YMMV / Silent Running

• Narm: For some, a few of Freeman's rants bring the Ren and Stimpy episode "Space Madness" to mind.
• Padding: Very, very little of this film actually matters to its plot.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The implications of a world with no need for an environment, or a rebel refusing to sacrifice the last piece of such, are ignored entirely in favor of watching Our Hero meander around the dome.
  • A plot about an astronaut in space slowly going mad from the isolation and the guilt from murdering his fellow crewmembers? Interesting. A plot with an environmentalist message featuring an astronaut using his remaining days to teach maintenance robots to care for Earth's last forest, now preserved in a space dome? Interesting. Putting the two plots together in a single film? The result feels rather muddled and confused with its message (this was likely intentional, given that it's 70s sci-fi, but still...).
• Vindicated by History: The film got little to no advertising from the studio and therefore bombed at the box office, but now it's a Cult Classic.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Everything from the robots to the view of Saturn and its rings. After all, the movie was directed by visual effects legend Douglas Trumbull, who had also done the effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Saturn effects were originally meant for 2001 but weren't ready in time, so they were used in this movie. Amazingly, the film was made with a budget of just one million dollars, though it certainly doesn't look that way.

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