For the 5th of our Movie Review podcasts here at TMR we welcome back our good friends Frank Johnson (of the Ancient Aliens Debunked blog) and Mark Campbell (of Bowler or Fez Film Reviews) for a roundtable discussion on the 1972 classic sci-fi movie Silent Running, starring Bruce Dern and directed by Douglas Trumbull.

Having been tasked for years with preserving Earth's last remaining forests—now housed in large geodesic domes on the spaceship Valley Forge orbiting Saturn—botanist Freeman Lowell (played by Bruce Dern) at length receives orders to abandon the project, destroy the forests and return the spaceship to commercial service. Horrified by the callousness and insanity of the orders, Freeman takes matters into his own hands, kills his insouciant work colleagues and hijacks the Valley Forge in an attempt to rescue Earth's last ecological treasures. But from that moment on he has only the forests and the robots—"Huey", "Dewey" and "Louie"—for company in the lonely silence of space.

Join us as we discuss many aspects of the film's production and ponder some of the ethical and worldview questions thrown up by its storyline.

[Podcast theme music: Moment of Green by Antony Raijekov (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).]

(Download Podcast - HQ 128 kbps)