Review: Logan's Run (1976)
Bad choices and bad editing mar this sci-fi film of the 70s
Logan's Run (1976)
Directed by Michael Anderson
I saw this movie when it came out in 1976 and remember being disappointed. It seemed to be a movie produced by adults hoping to make a movie that would be popular with youth. That was almost always a bad way to go about it, and this film is another in the long string of movies starting in 1966 or so that pander to youth and just end up looking stupid in the process.
This movie is a mess. After the first shot of the movie, showing a collection of white geodesic domes located in a wasteland, the second shot shows what's inside, and the movie immediately goes downhill. The city is an extremely tacky-looking 1960s amusement park – depicted by an obviously false-looking large model, judging by the look of a patch of water that looks nothing like a lake -- it's so badly done that the viewer's attention is drawn to it. Look at that cheap-ass model!
Then the third shot of the film: We're in a mall, populated by men and women wearing atrocious tunics in shades of green and red. They all wear these sheer tunics except for men clothed in black and grey -- the mall cops, known as Sandmen because their job is killing people. This has been explained in a text crawl at the beginning, along with the film's premise: That the society is entirely oriented toward pleasure, but everyone has to die at age 30 in a ritual known as Carousel.
So many bad choices in the first two minutes of the film: the stupid-looking model, the stupid-looking costumes, the setting in a mall. And these choices don't go away. The viewer says to themselves "Uh-oh" within two minutes, and the movie gives them no reason to change their feeling that this is going to be a disaster.
The first thing that happens is the Carousel ritual, played in an auditorium for maximum camp -- though the viewer is already wondering whether the camp is intentional. The protagonist Logan (Michael York) is interrupted in his enjoyment of an aerial performance by a text that says a "runner" -- someone who rejects the Carousel life ending thing and wants to escape the society -- is outside the auditorium. Logan and another Sandman, Francis (Richard Jordan) pursue and shoot him. And here we have another problem: the would-be escapee is simply running around a set with no apparent plan in mind. There are no exits, or at least the viewer has no idea where they are in relation to the direction he's "running," so there's no tension. The cops simply toy with him and then shoot him. We're 15 minutes into the film and the sense of awfulness is only increasing.
No need to go into the rest of the action -- I hesitate to use the word plot. I'll only mention one more failed aspect of the film. The female protagonist, played by Jenny Agutter -- in fact, almost all of the actors in the film are British, sort of like all the Germans in a WWII movie speak with British accents -- appears first as a deer in the headlights. In her next scene she strides around and declaims her lines like a Shakespearean actor. Occasionally during the film she acts naturally, but on the whole very stiffly. The script is no help. It never explains anything.
Later there's Farah Fawcett, then a completely stupid and cheap-looking robot, and at the end we find Peter Ustinov living in an overgrown US Capitol, seemingly the last man on earth outside the amusement park-like city from which there are, like this film, no exits. Ustinov lives in the Senate chamber with more than a dozen cats and recites T.S. Eliot to them. (The film predates the Broadway play based on Eliot's catteral by a few years. It's strange to think that "Logan's Run" might have had something to do with the eventual musical theater work, but the premise is similar. According to Wikipedia, "The plot centers on a tribe of cats called the Jellicles, as they come together at the annual Jellicle Ball to decide which one of them will ascend to the Heaviside Layer (their version of heaven) and be reborn into a new life.") Because Ustinov is never bad onscreen, his performance somewhat redeems the film's second half, but by then it's too late. It was too late after 15 minutes.