American Airlines now operates the American Space Fleet, and part of this fleet is a group of ships who carry domes of plant life from the thoroughly exploited Earth.  These ships are ordered to eject, and then nuke, all their domes.  The botanist of the Valley Forge decides to take action to save one of his domes.  Silent Running.

The title was interesting.  Silent Running evokes the image of submarines attempting to hide from enemies.  I was expecting a movie with action, where the botanist takes over the helm and attempts to keep his trees alive and convince everyone that they're worth keeping, while doing death defying feats of starship agility to keep those trees alive.

What I got was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

I mean, it was a movie about starships nuking trees, but after Princess Mononoke I was expecting something a little less... snooze producing.  I mean, I've seen 2001: A Space Oddesy.  I know that through creative directing and excellent script writing skills, you can even make space a boring place.

Lemmie save you the trouble of watching the movie.  Ordered to destroy the forests, Ship's Botanist goes envirowacko spittle-flying nuts, complaining that future generations of humans wouldn't be able to enjoy the forests.  The three other crewmen mention that Earth has destroyed disease and hunger, and that the planet is a uniform 75 degrees;  all surface area has been exploited in one way or another to help the Human race.  Everyone has fulfilling work.  In other words, everyone other than the botanist is more than happy.  It's my theory that this giant space fleet was sent out to:

1. Get people to stop griping about losing something they frankly didn't care about,
2. Get the last bits of the forest far enough away to be destroyed, again in a way that nobody would care about, and
3. Get rid of that boring pontificating botanist!

The rest of the crew just want to get home to their families.  The Human Race has gone this far without the forests, they can continue without them.  But the Botanist has other plans.  While the crew jettison and detonate the other five domes, the botanist goes and kills the Redshirt, and then jettisons the dome with the other two crew and nukes them along with the last remaining plats of the sahara desert area.  He killed three people... but he saved the trees!

He subequently allows one of the three ship's drones to be destroyed, flies a ship with a giant glass dome through the rings of Saturn, and claims massive ship damage when the fleet attempts to get him to jettison his pod.  He then continues flying the ship away from the solar system, in the process nearly killing another one of the drones.  Along the way, he teaches the drones how to care for the plants.  The plants start to die, and the botanist can't figure out why.  Disease?  Malnutrition?  Acid Rain?  What could it be?

The "botanist" flew the ship so far from the sun that it was DARK."  He didn't realize it until weeks later, when the rescue party shows up and mentions just how dark it is when you fly past SATURN.  The trees were dying from terminal stupidity.  But it's OK.  For the ship just so happens to have a portable generator that can last forever, alongside giant light bulbs that also last forever.

When the rescue party shows up and can't find the damage, the botanist claims that "it's on the other side of the ship" and jettisons the forest with the one remaining drone.  Then (apparently embarrased that he has a fully functional ship, or perhaps to keep secret the fact that he jettisoned the forest (even though if the other ships are close enough to check for damage they'd notice the jettison of an entire forest)), he rigs the nuclear detonators that were stowed away just in case they needed to nuke the forests (or perhaps all ships in the future carry nuclear warheads) to destroy himself and the Valley Forge.

The movie doesn't make any sense.  There's no point to any of it.  And it's all boring.  I guess I'm supposed to be saddened by the loss of the forests, but if I had to trade the forests in exchange for no more disease, or hunger, or war, I thnk it'd be immoral to do anything other.

And why fly the ships out to Saturn?  Why not keep them close to Earth?  And apparently the drones are smart enough to take care of the forrests... so why not automate the forrest stations?

For such an actiony title, the only action was the one fight scene when he kills the Redshirt.  The rest is an hour and a half of griping and complaining about losing the forests, environmentalists with big ideas being incredibly stupid and nearly killing everything he killed to save, and then committing suicide.

It's a contrived story.  Earth spends TRILLIONS to launch the forests into space, only to have an order beamed at them (for no reason, as explained in the movie.  They just decided on a whim apparently) to nuke 'em.  If the goal was really destruction, why go through the effort?  I guess the botanist is supposed to be a hero, but the only emotion I had about him was joy when he killed himself because now he wouldbe shut up and the movie was finally over.

I wish I had had some awesome movie reviewer to warn me off from this movie.  Those are precious minutes I can never get back.  I think I'm going to go throw away a ream of blank printer paper just to make a point about how far back this movie must have set the environmental movement.

That's not to say that the story is without potential.  I believe that with a few more explosions, fewer hours of pontification, some more action, maybe even a crewman or two who actually cared, and a bit of effort to prove that the Earth was a stinking hell-hole and not a treeless paradise, and this movie could at least stand proud next to Armageddon and Day After Tomorrow as disaster movies that are at least fun to laugh at.