Logan's Run (DVD)

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Logan's Run (DVD)Imagine a future world where everyone is young and beautiful, and can have anything they could ever want--except the freedom to leave ... and everyone faces mandatory death at the age of 30! Michael York stars as Logan, a member of an elite police force called Sandmen who hunt down and kill "runners," those trying to escape the fate that awaits on their 30th birthday. When Logan meets Jessica (Jenny Agutter), a member of a clandestine resistance group that assists runners, he decides to escape with her to sanctuary. But a fellow Sandman frantically pursues.]]> Review: A Good Science Fiction Movie for its Time - In hindsight, this movie can be credited as one of the first cyberpunk movies ever made, and it's also a testament of how rigid the rating system for movies has become at present. Logan's Run was rated PG back in 1976 and includes nudity (almost full-frontal, no less) from Jenny Agutter in one scene, plus the clothes she wears are pretty much transparent throughout; you'd never see that in one of today's PG-rated films. The next few paragraphs contain spoilers of the plot, so for those of you who haven't seen the movie yet, you might want to skip over. I've never read the novel it's based on, but the premise of the movie is pretty unique, considering. About 300 years in the future, the whole of civilization is contained inside one huge domed city, with the ruins surrounding it the result of some apocalyptic event. Life inside the city is utopic. There are no worries beyond choosing what you're going to do with your free time. There are drugs. There's sex with no commitment (indeed, any kind of emotional attachment is looked on as an aberration). There's getting a different face at the local New You bodysculpting kiosk. Everything is provided for you by the computer mainframe that runs the city. There is no crime, save one. Running. You see, the price for this kind of carefree existence is that your life ends when you turn thirty. In an effort to maintain population control, the mainframe has conditioned people to accept their thirtieth birthday as 'Lastday' and present themselves for a special celebration called Carousel where they 'renew' and start life over. People know when their time arrives when a small crystal imbedded in the palm of their hand begins flashing. Certain individuals rebel against this and they've formed an underground movement with the ankh (the ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal life) as their icon. They don't believe in the myth of Carousel and they choose to run instead. The Sandmen, the only real police force the city has, exist specifically to hunt these Runners down and eliminate them. The main character of the movie is Logan 5, a Sandman, who is perfectly content with his job hunting Runners with his friend, until he meets up with Jessica 6, played by Jenny Agutter, who has one of the underground's ankhs in her possession. The mainframe then chooses him to infiltrate the underground movement and eliminate it from the inside. The incentive it gives him is by taking away his remaining time, forcibly turning him into a Runner. He begins to question everything he's been taught to believe after teaming up with Agutter's character to escape the city. Through their journey, being pursued all the while by Logan's Sandman friend, they discover a rather chilling side to both the city itself and the society within it. Outside the city they come across something they've never witnessed before, a man who's lived long enough to be in his dotage (played convincingly by Peter Ustinov of 'Spartacus' fame). They bring him back to the city, where Logan is captured and brought before the mainframe computer for questioning. The computer cannot reconcile his answers with the information it possesses and self destructs. Logan then reveals the Old Man to the rest of society, letting them know they don't have to die. People are then free to make their own decisions and live life as they see fit. End of story. END OF SPOILER This movie was one of the first to portray the dangers of what civilization could become. At first glance, everything might seem to be bliss, but the degree to which everything has become impersonalized and controlled and how de-valued the individual has become in the story is really rather frightening. Look at society today. Companies now refer to us as 'human resources' rather than personnel, willing to cut 25,000 jobs here and 50,000 jobs there, calling it a 'business decision' and leaving many people on the verge of homelessness. Political correctness is currently all the rage. Computers are taking a much more prominent role in our personal lives than ever before. With our current 'entitlement' attitude, we pretty much insist on having everything set before us on a silver platter and complain LOUDLY when it isn't. Don't think. Exist. We are now SO content to let others handle our personal responsibilities that Logan's Run has almost a prophetic air to it. The one difference is that our lives don't currently have a time limit. Yet... This vision alone puts it up there as one of the classics of the day. I'm also not taking off any marks for the 1970s special effects. They may seem incredibly dated today, but they were considered good at the time. They just didn't have access to CGI. Also, the dialogue and the acting were par for the course for the time period so I'm giving that high marks, too. The movie was also popular enough to spawn a short-lived television series. The series was rather more cinematic than the movie in scope, considering some of the creatures the trio of adventurers comes across, but it was still entertaining in its own way. All in all, Logan's Run was a movie with a VERY powerful message behind it, and it is one worth listening to. Keep an open mind and you might enjoy it. And before you think of jumping the gun and trashing Logan's Run because it WAS a cheesy 1976 sci-fi flick, movie producer Joel Silver likes this show enough to be pushing to direct a new version of it. Two thumbs up. Review: Don't Make the Mistake of Comparing the Film to the Novel - Anyone who compares this movie to the novel, especially in highlighting differences as a failure to "be true" to the authors' vision, is making a mistake. The book and the film share a title, and some other elements, but the tone and even the conflicts are distinct. Take each on its own. While I encourage you to read the book, and strongly encourage you to see the DVD, I hope you will appreciate the very different minds they each explore. The world of the novel is noir-dark, universal, and consciously cynical. Though folks only live to 21 (vs. 30 in the film), there are lots of doubters and many weird little subcultures, such as Molly's giant, or the "culture of one" who is the terrifying Box (yes, there is a Box in the film, but only some details, and the name, were kept to nod to the book; the Box in the movie is a machine acting on programming, dangerous but not evil, a contrast to the damaged human psychopath artist of the book). Blade Runner has more in common with the novel Logan's Run than does this movie. So, why do I love the movie so much? It displays the mindless innocence of the subjects of ubiqitous fascism. The children in the City of Man have known nothing else, are swaddled in this shallow, stifling cocoon of a society, without a history (there are no books or elders to carry history), and immersed in a pale, candy culture where no one creates anything. The only signs of human endeavor are in the Runners, whose dissent makes them enemies of the State/City who must be killed, and in the Sandmen, who at least develop skills as hunters. Logan's Run, the movie, therefore tells a story that is closer to the peril of many still-comfortable U.S. Americans, content (and able to) drown their doubts in busy pursuit of easy, vapid pleasures that discourage independent thought. Comforted by the assurance that the City will care for them and that the pale religion of the city promises the salvation of Renewal, and the chance to live life after healthy, silly, fun, worry-free life, the young people of the mall-city remind me of the blinkered folks of our culture who only see suffering rarely, and can change the channel if it threatens to awaken them from the padded cells of their colonized minds. I love watching those sweet, dumb kids, Logan and Jessica, progress through the slow satori of this movie, as well as the classical mythic elements of labyrinths, secret doors, birth canals, underworld, pinnacle and other symbolic elements which are scattered all through the film, but which no other review here has yet mentioned. These children, who seem to lack even fairy tales, traverse the same psychic landscape fairy tales illuminate in other cultures, but do so in real physical peril. See this film, and critique the uneven directing and the dated look, but go ahead and explore the Hero's Journey (which myth famously informed Star Wars). That myth may be more relevant to those of us lucky enough to be in cyberspace in the form explored by Logan's Run. For the priveleged (and if you are reading this, you are priveleged far over the majority of the world's folks), the risk of sleepwalking in the dreamworld of friendly fascism is very real. The evil Empire of Star Wars is an open oppresser, inspiring rebellion; The City of Logan's Run, by contrast, is a mindless, benevolent dictator, inspiring nothing, assuring risk-free consumerism forever.