chris-3415

Whilst "i dig repetition", there seems to be a lot of it in Moonage Daydream, and i'm afraid it simply looks like poor control of the material. This film is a great illustration of bowie's lyric "fame, puts you there where things are hollow". Its way too long, with lots of flashing lights and stuff but not much solid information. I found it very disappointing. It ended up making bowie look kind of vacuous, especially compared to the recently released spiders from mars documentary, which is just excellent concert footage and great sound from a single point in bowie's career. I guess you could call this one a fanboy's homage to his hero. I watched it to the end, ever hopeful, but i came away exhausted and underwhelmed.

this review contains spoilers! its 1972 and the summer of love has been followed by the winter of the machine. what can a poor boy do? realising he is powerless in the face of the new world order, he drops out (hard 1970s style, not soft 1960s style) kills the local supporters of the status quo, retreats to his bedroom in the shadow of saturn (astrological reference), neglects the washing up and lets the pot plants wither away. he's been on the job looking after the terrarium for 8 years but he still hasn't learned that plants need sunlight to photosynthesise, duh. he talks to machines that can't talk back and imagines a response. he goes crazy. in the end he lets his dreams go, and commits suicide, in the process taking out the people who have tried to rescue him. his problem is that he's locked into a machine system which has no avenue of escape. he tries to save the plants with artificial life, ends up using the on-board Abomb to do himself in. his whole existence is predicated on the machines and he just can't deal with it. he's a hippy ideologue. read in this way its an OK story, but really, considering kubrick's 2001 was made some years before it, silent running is pretty lame. it has much more in common with the moralistic scifi movies of the 1950s and 60s, despite its groovy environmental themes (also pretty old hat by this time; rachel Carson's silent spring was published in 1962). and joan baez's sentimental quavering on the soundtrack is frankly unbearable.