Logan's Run

1976 sci-fi nonsense

Rating: 13/20

Plot: It's 2274, and everything's great in a hedonistic society where people don't do much of anything but enjoy each other's company. And wear bad clothing. Man, people in the future dress poorly. The only problem is that everybody dies at the age of 30 in a Carousel ritual. Some citizens don't like that and try to flee, and it's up to the Sandmen to chase them down. The titular Sandman, while on a mission, discovers that there's more going on than people think.

This is often unfairly compared to Star Wars which came out only a year later and looked so much better. It also seems to have a few things in common--the use of national landmarks, I guess--with Planet of the Apes which came out around eight years earlier. Neither of those movies had Farrah Fawcett, however, and Logan's Run definitely has some Farrah Fawcett. It's also got Michael York who looks even more plastic than he normally does, and Jenny Agutter who out-cutes even Farrah Fawcett. This is a little cold, maybe even for a science fiction movie, so I don't really care much about the characters or their relationships. The most dynamic relationship is between Logan and his Sandman buddy played by Richard Jordan. The best two characters aren't main characters at all. There's one of the dumbest-looking robots ever, a robot named Box voiced by Roscoe Lee Browne. "Welcome, humans!" And then there's Peter Ustinov who stumbles into the movie and starts eating the marble. The breathy laugh when he comments about his name, the way he says "Cats!", gratuitous lip-smacking, a terrific elderly hip thrust during a poem recitation. And his "Nothing sadder than a dead fish" makes me wonder if Ustinov was allowed to improvise during his scenes. He's great and hammy though, and a movie that was already visually interesting and only kinda dull really picks up when York and Agutter run into his character. A lot of the special effects are so crappy that it's a wonder they were allowed to happy (The use of sparklers is a bit of a distraction, for example), but I really did like how a lot of this looked. The Carousel scene is really dopey, but it's visually neat. There's also some great music--all abstract synthesizer tinklings--and a fair share of nudity for a movie rated PG. For a sci-fi movie about a dystopian society, you almost want a little more depth, some kind of big message, but this one's here mostly for entertainment and doesn't really deliver anything like that.