in so many words

Another science fiction movie I’ve always enjoyed is Silent Running, which stars Bruce Dern and three small robots called “Drones” that pre-date R2D2 by several years. The premise of the story is that, because the Earth of the future has been developed to the point that there are no longer any forest areas, all of the forests have been relocated into giant domes attached to cargo space ships that are floating around the solar system. When budget cuts force the cargo ships back into commercial service and trigger the destruction of all of the forest domes, crew member and botanist Freeman Lowell (Dern) decides to take matters into his own hands, killing his crew mates and taking over the ship for the sake of saving the forests. With the three drones - which he names Huey, Duey, and Louie - Lowell pilots the ship into deep space and maintains the ship and forests for months, until he is located by a rescue party. Fearful of what the rescue party will do, Lowell fires the last remaining dome into space, sending one of the drones along to care for the forest. It’s an interesting movie with good special effects, especially for 1972, and it’s become a sci-fi cult classic, in spite of the incredibly dated soundtrack that includes a song sung by Joan Baez. But still a movie worth seeing for sci-fi buffs.