directed by Michael Anderson
screenplay by David Zelag Goodman
after the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (1967)
120 min.

As far as the viewing experience goes, it’s terrible. I mean, I might have some non-negative stuff to say about it, but I don’t want to mislead anyone: it totally failed to be a good movie.

I’ll grant that a big part of that was the special effects, most of which have aged incredibly poorly. It was almost funny to watch the promotional “featurette” made at the same time and see the studio pushing the movie mostly in terms of the craftsmanship and high technology that went into the effects work. The miniature exteriors in the movie look so blatantly like miniatures that I often didn’t know what I was looking at, at first. “Which character has this big toy?” I would think. “Oh I see.” The sets all had that big blank clumsy quality that when I was a kid used to make me feel like not only was the place in the movie creepy, but the 70s were also creepy, since nothing about the movie seemed to acknowledge its all-pervasive creepiness. In THX-1138, a very similar movie, George Lucas sort of used that big blank feeling to his benefit, whereas here I got the impression that they really thought they had built the future. The ice cavern was particularly confusing/embarrassing. Star Wars, released a year later, apparently made it unacceptable for big studio movies to settle for effects like these. But I thought 2001, way back in 1968, famously established a new standard for effects, and most of 2001 still looks pretty good. So I’m not really sure why this stuff wasn’t already embarrassing in 1976, but apparently it wasn’t.

The writing was in the standard trashy sci-fi style, where nobody really has anything to say to each other except for to talk about the plot. And the acting lived right up to it, except for Peter Ustinov, who did his own thing with complete confidence. His performance was pretty ridiculous too but at least it was something to watch. Farrah Fawcett(-Majors) seemed to be handled with the sole interest of creating something that would become “camp” as quickly as possible.

The premise (live a life of pleasure and be KILLED ON YOUR THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY) is a messy one to elaborate on because it doesn’t make any sense. When you first hear it, you might think, “oh, interesting,” but that’s as much as you’re going to get – it’s a dead end. As I remember it, “The Lottery” leads up to the comparable nasty twist and then ends there, because the impact of that nastiness is the whole point. The movie of Soylent Green goes for the same thing, which rightly makes it the subject of a lot of mockery, because building a full-length movie around a nasty secret that’s only revealed at the end makes for a boring, obvious movie. A.I. was a movie based on a story with a twist, presented with the twist untwisted, and it had to wander very far afield in search of some other reason to exist. The sci-fi/horror short story that’s all about the final twist is a well-established form, but it just doesn’t translate well into a long form like a feature film. It happens all the time in my nightmares that I’ll have that horrible realization feeling, like, “my god, all along he’s been EATING them!” but when I wake up I see that the feeling exists on its own, not as part of a thought. Short stories can have that effect as their goal. Building something larger out of a “my god!” concept means setting up all kinds of provisional pseudo-logic to get you through.

Q: Why does this society accept death at 30? A: Um, because they’ve been led to believe that the death ritual reincarnates them.
Q: But who established this lie? A: Um, apparently this big computer.
Q: But I thought you said this culture was devised as a way of coping with a war-torn world. A: Um…yeah, that too.
Q: But when they go outside the world is fine. A: Um, right…right, it’s all unnecessary.

And so on and so on.

The fake-logic overload actually sets in in the first clause of the opening text: “The survivors of war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city…” The survivors of war, sure; the survivors of pollution, okay (though the water’s apparently fine); but “the survivors of overpopulation”?

Of course, Logan’s Run is adapted from a full-length non-twist novel, but I have no reason to believe the novel is any good! From what I read online, it seems to be a dorky rebuttal to 60s youth culture – “hey you guys, you think you’re so great being young and having a lot of sex, but you don’t want to have sex with me because I’m old and I write science fiction! You’d probably kill me off, if you had your way! But I can see finer things, human things, great things! The truth, outside your tawdry city of pleasure! You damn dirty apes!” Yeah – as I see it, Logan’s Run is a rejection of hedonism on the least philosophically defensible grounds – namely, sour grapes – and so, since it has no real case to make, it has to add this totally absurd death-cult aspect to make youth and pleasure actually seem unsavory. The movie ends with hordes of young people fascinated by a mumbly old wrinkly man, just as they might be fascinated by a puppy. There’s no chance in hell any of them wants to get old and BE him. Logan and his love interest make plans to get married, but they do it because it seems like a cute idea. They never actually rejected it – they’ve never considered it before – so they’re not learning anything new. Do you really think they’re going to stick with it?

There is a truth, buried under all this confusion, which is that young people in search of pleasure are somewhat oblivious to the truth of aging and death. But so are plenty of old people, and isn’t that, in fact, praiseworthy? Hedonism might be irresponsible, but not because it denies the inevitable! The inevitable can take care of itself. Hedonism is irresponsible because it denies things that actually could be improved, like, ahem, war, pollution, and overpopulation. Another standard sci-fi premise is the world in which pleasure is provided so long as you do not question it (a la THX-1138). But again, that’s a dorky abstraction that misses the point; the real-world culure of denial that these movies critique is not the result of a decree, it’s something most people WANT. If American culture provides us with a comfort-dome outside of which we’re not encouraged to look, it’s because supply and demand took us here. And yeah, that’s a problem, but it’s not one of those nightmare-style “big lie” problems that sci-fi likes. The “big lie” in a comfort-oriented culture is cumulative, not systematic. The Matrix is about a big lie perpetrated by, essentially, evil gnostic-style gods. Logan’s Run had an inscrutable evil in the form of a big computer. This isn’t a useful way of thinking about our problems. Brazil was a much more interesting movie in this respect, because it showed that the terrorists looking for an evil computer to blow up just added to the confusion.

I guess the political idea I’m moving toward here is that the “my god! it’s people!” vision is worse than naive, because it encourages the search for THE MISTAKE. And Logan’s Run was a good example of why that’s misguided, because the writers had to go to such terrible lengths to construct their world’s problems in the form of A MISTAKE.

I generally write and talk about movies in the present tense, but in writing this I notice that I drifted pretty heavily towards the past. I think that reflects something about the movie – it has nothing to say to the present; there’s only camp left here. And/or I guess nostalgia, for people of a certain age and inclination.

Looks like I didn’t have much non-negative to say after all.

4:38 PM: Oh yeah, I forgot – Jerry Goldsmith’s score was very cool and outclassed the movie many times over.

Here are some pre-movie book covers I found online.