Essentials: 20 Oddball Sci-Fi Films Of The 1970s

“Quintet” (1979)
The eclectic and uneven career of Robert Altman saw the filmmaker tackle practically every genre under the sun, (westerns, noirs, ‘30s gangster movies, mysteries, gumshoe dick movies) minus maybe a straight-up action film. But Altman was never interested in genre much, always placing the emphasis on more human behavior and interaction, so it’s not a surprise his ill-fated attempt at sci-fi with “Quintet” didn’t exactly work. Set in a wintry, post-apocalyptic future where a new ice age has ravaged Earth, “Quintet” stars Paul Newman (they would collaborate only twice – both collaborations were less than stellar) as a man named Essex, a survivor in a barren, unflaggingly frozen wasteland, who gets drawn into a mysterious game called “Quintet” after being attacked and nearly killed by a gambler. The game, it turns out, is a kind of role playing game, but if you’re killed in the game, you’re also murdered in real life. (Someone uploaded a PDF of the game’s “rules,” part of the promotional materials, online. Read them here.) While Altman does a great job of sustaining an atmosphere and mood of dreadful unpredictability (though arguably this just means smearing the camera with gauzy vaseline the entire time), there are long, quiet, arguably agonizing, stretches of “Quintet” where nothing really happens (released two years after “Star Wars,” and the same year as “Alien,” you can see why genre fans were also unresponsive). Co-starring some fantastic international stars that probably asked themselves what they were doing in this film (Fernando Rey, Vittorio Gassman, Bibi Andersson), “Quintet” is undeniably a fascinating blip on Altman’s filmography, and a precursor to more widely accepted things like “Battle Royale” and “The Hunger Games.” Newman’s performance, too, is a tightly coiled one, all wild nerves and raw instinct. Too bad about the languid polar ice-cap pace. Bonus weirdly futuristic points go to the film’s shooting location: the site of the Montreal Expo 67 World’s Fair.

“Rollerball” (1975)
Ultraviolent roller derby…that’s a hell of an idea for an exploitation picture. But, wait, is this movie actually… something more? Starring James Caan at the peak of his fame and directed by Norman Jewison (“In the Heat of the Night,” “The Cincinnati Kid,” and later “A Soldier’s Story” and “Moonstruck”) it is evident from the opening notes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor that “Rollerball” has nobler aspirations than the shocks of a futuristic spiked glove in your face. While the “extreme sports” action is brutal, there’s also some remarkable world-building on display. Nations have been replaced by goods-specific corporations (our team is Energy,) manipulative computers hold all historical records and society is kept in check with the bread and circuses of a complex, bloody roller skate-based sport (hey, why not?) A central sequence featuring a debauched party and a flame thrower works almost as its own one-act play, and the carefully framed modernist architecture gives everything an eerie, sanitary feel. That is, of course, until individualist Jonathan E (Caan) refuses to tamp down his natural inclination toward excellence: then the whole contrived dystopia collapses under the might of his viscous roller skating prowess. If you are looking for a clip of all the best brutal “Rollerball” moments, why not watch the one set to the tune of AC/DC‘s “Hells Bells,” right?

“Silent Running” (1972)
Douglas Trumbull is one of the most renowned visual effects artists on the planet. He created the VFX for Stanley Kubrick‘s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” helped out with “Star Wars,” and his special effects credits are long and deep (“Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” “Blade Runner,” “The Tree of Life“) running nearly six decades deep (he most recently did some spectacular macrobiological effects and visuals for Shane Carruth‘s “Upstream Color“). But as a director on his own? Hmmm, not so much. Set in the far, far future, Earth has become an inhospitable wasteland where no plantation or natural food grows. The SS Valley Forge is on a space mission where it’s growing 4 lush forests in gigantic geodesic domes containing some of the botanical specimens left on the planet. Crunchy botanical scientist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) is happy tending to his forest of rabbits, trees, vegetation and eagles until a directive from Earth arrives telling all on board abandon the project and get back home toute suite. Deeply upset, having spent eight years tending to these domes, Lowell rebels, eventually snaps, killing one of the officers on board and then sabotages the other men tasked with blowing up the geodomes. Hijacking the freighter and faking his death to get Earth Mission command off his back, Lowell grows into a mad scientist type who renames two R2-like robots on board as Huey and Dewey and teaches them to play cards and how to pot plants (no, really). Fairly ridiculous from the get-go, “Silent Running” only gets more silly and laughable as Lowell’s descent into madness continues. A eco-friendly science-fiction film obviously (the message is as subtle as a jackhammer), sadly there are about two great moments in the film and one of them is the title sequence over incredibly beautiful and expressive macro photography of vegetation, flowers and amphibian creatures (the rest of the movie looks as if it’s lit like the “Buck Rogers” TV set). Perhaps the best/worst unintentionally funny element of the film are the hippie-dippie space folk songs song by Joan Baez (watch one particularly hilarious one here). While “Silent Running” isn’t very good, there’s a lot of ironic humor value on top of being strangely watchable, for all its ridiculous qualities.

“Solaris” (1972)
Tarkovsky’s follow-up to “Andrei Rublev” is rarely mentioned in a sentence without the word “2001” cropping up at the same time. But, aside from being a thoughtful, spiritual, meditatively paced science fiction film, based on a novel by one of the genre’s greats (Polish writer Stanislaw Lem), they have little in common: as J. Hoberman once pointed out in The Village Voice, the film in fact bears more resemblance to another critical darling, Alfred Hitchcock‘s “Vertigo.” There are no gadgets or CGI to be found, just people, in the story of Kelvin, a psychologist sent to investigate bizarre happenings on a space station that orbits the ocean planet Solaris, only to be greeted there by a manifestation of his late wife, who killed herself years earlier. For all of its fearsome reputation and running time, it’s a simple tale of grief and lost love, albeit one spiced up with sci-fi questions of identity, and the nature of humanity. Hari, Kelvin’s wife, is constructed from neutrons, but has all the memories, thoughts, and feelings of her deceased counterpart — does that not make her just as human? It’s a devastating tale (Hari’s second suicide attempt is truly wrenching), and arguably Tarkovsky’s most deeply felt story. There’s an argument to be made that Steven Soderbergh‘s 2002 remake is the superior film — at almost half the length, it’s a tighter, more focused picture, that doesn’t lose anything truly essential — but to cut down the original would be madness: as in all of his work, the best moments, like the languid, Earth-bound opening, or the stunning zero gravity sequence, are near-transcendent. Soderbergh would later state he was adapting the novel, not remaking the film “Solaris,” and compared Tarkovsky’s picture to a “sequoia,” while his was “a little bonsai.”

“Soylent Green” (1973)
Let’s get this out the way. Yes, Soylent Green is people, something that long ago joined “Psycho” and “Planet of the Apes” as famous twists probably spoiled for you by jokes on “The Simpsons” long before you saw the movie. Though in retrospect, even the original trailer hints at its twist pretty heavily. Based on Harry Harrison‘s novel “Make Room! Make Room!,” the film is set in a run-down, hugely overpopulated New York of 2022 (something that feels eerily plausible as it inches closer), where the starving population get by on a mysterious foodstuff known as Soylent Green. But when a director of the Soylent Corporation (the great Joseph Cotten) is murdered, NYPD cop Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is put on the case, discovering, with his “human library” pal Sol Roth (the final performance from Edward G. Robinson), a wide-reaching conspiracy with the ultimately shocking secret that much of the planet have been unwittingly turned into cannibals. Like many of these picks, Richard Fleischer‘s film is something of a mixed bag. Its theme of environmental disaster, overpopulation and corporate skulduggery are just as resonant, if not more so, than they were forty years ago, but the look and feel of the film hasn’t dated especially well. There’s a lovely performance from Robinson (who died twelve days after he wrapped filming, and told Heston of his terminal cancer just before filming his own death scene to get a better performance out of his co-star), but Heston’s a bit of a blank slate in the lead. And while its meld of science fiction and “Parallax View“-style paranoid thriller is a smart one, the script (by Stanley R. Greenberg, who has few notable credits otherwise) is fairly mediocre. Not a painful watch by any means, but with the film’s secret so widely known by now, hardly a necessary one.