I snagged Logan’s Run from the library because I’ve not seen it in almost a decade. I can appreciate it [only slightly] more now that I’m older.
I find the movie quite enjoyable, but this time the first thing I noticed is how stupid the future looks. Everything is glass and chrome and escalators, everyone wears these ridiculous monochromatic outfits that barely cover anything [the women especially have these scanty poncho things that leave their sides completely exposed and just barely go low enough to leave something to the imagination. thanks to the casting and the basic premise of the movie, they are quite easy on the eyes.]
No one is allowed to live past 30. When you reach that age you must basically offer yourself in a form of altruistic suicide called ‘carousel.’ Until you reach 30 you can live a life of hedonism. The main character, Logan 5 [Michael York] is a Sandman, basically a kind of cop who chases down Runners — 30 year olds who try to flee carousel. Logan is charged by the City computer to find a place called Sanctuary and destroy it. Sanctuary is where all of the successful Runners supposedly go.
So Logan gets ahold of Jessica [Jenny Agutter] who he had dialed up for random sex the evening before. [Free love is still very much free of consequence in this movie, a true sign that is is pre-HIV and of just how much HIV and all the other STDs have changed our thoughts in this area]. Jessica knows about Sanctuary and knows how to help Logan escape the City.
They eventually make it outside after several harrowing escapes and some completely gratuitous nudity in an ice cavern on a bearskin rug. Once outside they spend a day searching for water and when they find it they pork for the first time whilst skinny dipping. Logan’s best friend, another Sandman, tracks them to the ruins of Washington D.C. where they run into a crazy old hermit [Peter Ustinov, who will forever only be the voice of Prince John in Disney’s animated Robin Hood]. The other Sandman gets killed in a fight with the American flag, Logan and Jessica convince the crazy old hermit to accompany them back to the city where they will free everyone from their 30 year prison sentence of sex, drugs and debauchery. They succeed, the end.
Farrah Fawcett-Majors is in this movie and has to be the most brainless twit I have ever had the amazement to observe. I don’t really know anything about Farrah Fawcett except that she was supposedly a hotty back in the 1970s. I find it hard to believe that she could actually be so dumb in real life. Is’t possible?
There are only white folks in the movie. Apparently all the other folks with not-so-easily sunburned skin got nuked in WW III or something.
The film seems liberal [what with all the gratuitous sex, drugs, etc.] but actually reaffirms very conservative values of marriage, the nuclear family and all that stuff.
Once the city is destroyed and all the young folk escape the movie ends. It ends on a happy note right before things are about to get really shitty. None of the recently-from-the-city folks know anything about surviving in a wilderness environment. I bet they get quite irate with their new ‘freedom’ that will restrict their debauchery in favor of mindless drudgery for years and years and years and years until they die of rheumatoid arthritis or gout or malnutrition.
I remember watching the TV show off and on at times. I don’t think I ever really got in to it though. Probably wasn’t violent enough for my childhood taste.
its from 1976.
and your lib/cons description is much better than mine.
‘gun nuts’ sounds cool.
oh, i liked it well enough. be prepared for a heavy cornball factor.
It always interests me how sci-fi movies of a certain era (I’m assuming this is early 80s) can have similar plot themes. Such as how Dark City, The Matrix, and 13th Floor all have the premise that life as you know it is a pretty illusion built to hide something much darker. I say that because to me this sounds similar in a way to Bladerunner — in that you have the idealized young beings who get it all except a lifespan and the rogue character who is charged with bringing them in and forcing them to accept their own death.
Also — on the note of it seeming liberal but really being conservative, I would argue that from your description it seems to be a conservative view of liberalism. It is a common exaggerated view for conservatives to view liberals as selfish, hedonistic Caligulas just as it is common for liberals to view conservatives as repressed bible-thumping gun nuts.
your review doesn’t exactly sound like an outright endorsement, but it made me want to see the movie (i never saw it). it sounds kind of interesting. i have a thing for decades-old visions of the future.