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Silent Running
(1971). It's the year 2000 and spaceman Bruce Dern murders his
entire crew and hijacks a cargo ship with a payload of greenhouses
carrying Earth's last vegetation and hightails it out for Saturn.
You'd think they'd have seen that coming when they assigned a
professional nut-job like Dern to space duty. Anyway, Dern
starts to suffer from terminal loneliness, what with having
murdered his crew and all, so he programmes the ship's robot drones to
play poker and do a bit of light gardening. He also renames them
Huey, Dewey, and Louie, which just goes to show that he should have
kept up with his medication.
These robots are
quite the pieces of engineering. According to the film, their
programming is entirely hardwired and in order to get them to draw to
an inside straight Dern has to stick circuit boards under a microscope
and go at them with a mini-arc welder. Fortunately, we are
spared scenes depicting the hundreds of man hours he spends cussing
and fuming as he tries to debug the blasted things. |
