I came into my second viewing of Logan’s Run the same way I went into my first: With an open mind and a hopeful heart. This may seem paradoxical, given that my first exposure to the film upon its 1976 opening did not end well—and by “not end well,” I mean me walking past the line waiting to get into the next show and screaming, “YOU’RE WASTING YOUR MONEY!”
Still, I’m not quite the mega-passionate, hot-headed youth I was in my twenties (I’m now a mega-passionate, hot-headed ol’ fart). And the ensuing forty-five years have seen Logan’s Run, if not quite rise to the level of a genre classic, at least accrue enough affection to be regarded as a notable entry in the field. Which raised a concern: I’d originally proposed examining the flaws of Logan’s Run, but with the passage of time, would I see a different film? Honestly, if maturity (such as it is) allowed me to better appreciate what I had denigrated before, I would not have hesitated to contact my editor and say, “I’m sorry, I’ve made a horrible mistake. The premise I pitched to you is completely wrong—let’s just forget the whole thing.”
The fact that you’re reading this article serves as testament that what I felt about the movie then is just as applicable now. Let’s discuss.
Mind you, it isn’t as if the basic plot isn’t compelling. Some two hundred years into the future, ecological disaster has seen a meager handful of humanity retreat to domed biospheres. There, under the care of an omnipresent computer system, people live a carefree, hedonistic lifestyle. But paradise under limited resources comes with a price: No one lives past the age of thirty. When time runs out and the glowing crystal in the palm of your left hand turns black, you have two choices: Either report to Carousel, an anti-grav arena where those whose time is up can attempt to snag a rare opportunity at “renewal;” or literally run for your life, and hope that your path does not cross that of a Sandman, the armed, ruthless enforcers of the system.
It is the misfortune of one Sandman, Logan—played by Michael York—to have terminated a runner who was carrying an Ankh amulet, the symbol for Sanctuary, a mythic—and illegal—refuge for runners located beyond the city’s protective domes. The computer system, discovering Logan in possession of the trinket, accelerates his crystal to its termination point, and charges him with going undercover as a runner in order to discover the location of Sanctuary. Filled with growing doubts about the system he has spent his lifetime serving, Logan joins forces with Jessica (Jenny Agutter)—possessor of another Ankh symbol—and, while being pursued by former colleague Francis (Richard Jordan), must contend with 25-year-old juvenile delinquents, homicidal plastic surgeons, an insane food-processing robot, and Peter Ustinov in order to discover the secret of Sanctuary, and the truth about his dystopic Shangri-La.
Give director Michael Anderson his due: a veteran of such films as Around the World in 80 Days and The Quiller Memorandum, he does know how to stage a moment. His envisioning of Carousel is suitably strange and unsettling—the masked participants floating up from a bowl-shaped turntable toward a glowing white crystal, only to perish before reaching their goal (although the event is less “fiery,” as described in the opening title crawl, as it is “explody”).
He knows how to deploy stillness for dramatic effect, as when Logan waits while a scanner lingers over the Ankh, the Sandman’s anxiety accentuated by the quiet clicking of computer relays in the background. He gives his mad food-processing robot, Box—played by Roscoe Lee Browne—more motivation for his murderous intent beyond the general sadism exhibited by the same character in William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson’s original novel. And by making Francis a close colleague of Logan’s, he grants the rival Sandman some emotional grounding that elevates him beyond just being the indomitable Javert of the novel.
Some choices, though, undercut the final effect. The film’s termination date has been aged-up from the novel’s twenty to thirty—perhaps necessary for the sake of getting popular actors who could handle their roles, but also blunting the notion of lives extinguished too soon (to be fair, Nolan and Johnson also struggled with portraying teenagers in the book—too often their characters’ speech and actions would be as fitting for forty-five-year-olds as fifteen). The authors managed to sneak in hints that Paradise is beginning to fray around the edges, a more subtle indication of corruption than the film’s evil computer. And instead of having a machine rob Logan of his remaining years, the novel’s protagonist has naturally aged toward his black crystal and, still the committed Sandman, begins his pursuit of Sanctuary as a way of going out with the glory of having single-handedly discovered and invoked the destruction of the refuge. His change of heart evolves gradually from his interactions with Jessica and the struggles they go through, rather than being prematurely triggered at the story’s start, as happens in the film.
But that change—from the novel’s “We can be more than the world we were born into” to the film’s “The system is rigged!”—can be easily comprehended in context, considering the time of Logan’s Run’s creation. The years surrounding 1976 marked the end of one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, seeing the waging and ignominious resolution of a highly unpopular war, the resignation in disgrace of a corrupt president, and a vast, cultural shift in which Baby Boomers en masse rejected the values of the post-war period and sought to rebuild society on their own terms (that they were not all that successful is a topic for another time). Cynicism, fatalism, and an overall mistrust of entrenched power were the orders of the day. That attitude seeped irrevocably into popular media, and while science fiction had already begun to veer away from tales of bug-eyed monsters and slinky, alien seductresses prior to 1968, that year’s release of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes triggered a massive shift in the genre, allowing it to encapsulate a whole raft of contemporary anxieties. From the helpless paranoia of Colossus: The Forbin Project to the ecological despair of Silent Running to the class critique of Soylent Green, science fiction became the conduit by which cultural tensions and controversies could be spotlighted and discussed.
The problem for Logan’s Run, though, was that the movie was coming at the tail end of this cycle. There had been so much hand-wringing over what kind of dreary future was in the offing—even fledgling filmmaker Steven Spielberg had tried his hand at it with “L.A. 2017,” a peculiar episode of the TV show, The Name of the Game, that saw series lead Gene Barry cast forward in time into an environmentally-ravaged Los Angeles—that Run’s list of ominous outcomes felt played out, if not a little silly. The ludicrousness wasn’t helped by the portrayal of a decadent, youthful society (if “pushing thirty” can still be called “youthful”), presented more from the perspective of, “Hey, you kids, get offa my lawn!” than with an actual empathy for youth culture. (Although, to be fair, a moment when Logan summons up a male on his Dial-a-Boink transporter and reacts with not much more than an expression of, “Nah, not tonight,” is remarkably restrained for the time.)
But unlike the Star Trek episode “The Way to Eden,” there may have been more to Run’s invocation of the “kids are the aliens among us” trope than general audiences may have perceived. Concurrent with, and inextricably tied to, the overall societal revolution, Hollywood was going through a revolution of its own. The studios had never quite recovered from the anti-trust suit that lost them control of their movie theaters, and audiences had been steadily declining, the aging proprietors of the dream factories seemingly incapable of conceiving projects that would lure young patrons away from TV and back to the theaters. The jettisoning of the censorious Production Code in favor of the MPAA ratings system was supposed to be a remedy, but instead exacerbated the situation, opening the door to a new generation of filmmakers spawned from film schools and B-movie studios, artists who’d been weened on 16mm cameras and weren’t afraid of shooting on location. The likes of Arthur Penn, Hal Ashby, and Dennis Hopper—working within and without the studio system—weren’t afraid of incorporating explicit gore, frank sexuality, and pure, raw emotional honesty into their works, soundtracked with cuts pulled from popular recording artists rather than lush, studio orchestras. It’s worth considering the possibility that director Anderson (age 56 at the time of Run’s release), screenwriter David Zelag Goodman (46), and producer Saul David (55) were casting a wary eye at the generation of creatives nipping at their heels, and allowing that anxiety to seep into Run’s mise en scene.
One thing’s for sure: Even for the time, the film felt old. Composer Jerry Goldsmith welcomes us into the future with a hackneyed, synthesized thrumming, transitioning into mechanized trilling as we move from an unconvincing exterior flyover of the biodomes to an interior overview of the elaborately modeled—and still unconvincing—miniature cityscape. Art director Dale Hennesy’s main strategy for envisioning the twenty-third century is to take a setting—most notoriously a Texas shopping mall—and accent it with polished chrome and brushed aluminum. There are striking visual moments, such as a glimpse of Box’s victims trapped within ice, and Matthew Yuricich delivers some evocative matte paintings of a flora-overgrown Washington D.C. (which means that the biodomes are located somewhere within the wastelands of…Virginia?). But in the waning years of the 1970s, the look and feel of Logan’s Run reflected a design sense that had already run its course.
As had this dour subgenre overall: For all of its big-budget lavishness, Logan’s Run’s grim, preachy outlook felt tired. The film did well at the box office, but its lasting impact ironically lay not in its own ideas, but in how a growing dissatisfaction with a played-out form of speculation laid the groundwork for the next revolution in genre film, a quantum shift in the field that many—albeit subconsciously—longed for, but that few at the time could have anticipated.
On May 25, 1977, practically one year to the day of Logan’s Run’s release, Star Wars debuted in theaters in the U.S.
From its very first frames, George Lucas’ space fantasy declared itself the polar opposite of the hectoring, grim speculations Hollywood had been turning out. Instead of a dehumanized, quasi-“futuristic” synthesizer score, audiences were greeted by John Williams’ rousing, orchestral fanfare. The settings eschewed a designer’s fitful prognostication of what a future might look like for something realer, scrappier, more lived-in; the tech felt substantial and credible (so long as you could accept that androids might manifest the personalities of eight-year-old savants or fussy English manservants). And, most of all, it was fun. Lucas—who in another irony made his feature debut with the dystopic THX 1138—scrubbed away the cynical, paranoid pall of ’70s social awareness to create a binary universe of good and evil. He built his story out of a self-aware mashup of swashbuckling adventure, cheesy movie-serial sci-fi, and vague mysticism (echoing, in another ironic turn, the genre-hopping structure of Logan’s Run’s original novel). And he set it all in an indeterminate past (in a galaxy, etc, etc.), absolving the audience from looking fearfully toward the foreboding future, and instead embracing a time perceived as simpler, more innocent (even if reality contradicts that perception).
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A Psalm for the Wild-Built
And, in the final irony, Star Wars did what Logan’s Run could not: Reinvigorate the mainstream studios by luring back young audiences thought forever lost to the ’70s bad boys of film. Turns out the secret to mainstream success was not in trying to embrace the more cynical, grittier outlook of Scorsese and company, but in jettisoning it completely, injecting B-movie frivolity with A-movie budgets, and offering up films whose intersection with reality was glancing at best. The better filmmakers could inject some gravity into all the action and spectacle, but that would be a side-benefit, not the goal.
And maybe that’s the way it always should have been. The flaw of Logan’s Run was possibly that its principled moral stand rang hollow, motivated by market considerations rather than genuine social concern. I have no doubt the creators of Run invested considerable skill, energy, and heart into their work, but they aimed at the wrong goal, one of trying to ape a cinematic revolution—which, like the youth revolution overall, turned out to be more ephemeral than any of its participants could have imagined—within the confines of a dying system. Over time, the two disciplines would go their separate ways, mainstream film becoming bigger, louder, and more superficial—but not without its own pleasures and occasional deeper meanings—and more thoughtful genre films finding a home in smaller, indie productions, where the likes of a Denis Villaneuve or an Alex Garland have the freedom to delve the nuances of a speculative scenario without the pressure of pulling in a nine-figure box office.
In the end, I’ve come to feel that maybe I’d been a bit too harsh on Logan’s Run, but not completely wrong. It stands as a relic of a time when the titans of film attempted a course correction that their lumbering behemoth of an industry couldn’t quite negotiate. Logan’s Run leapt for something grand, but was pulled back to Earth by the system in which it was borne.
***
So, I know I’m gonna catch Hell from some of you for this. But that’s okay—this is my opinion and I stand by it. If you disagree you have an opportunity to rebut my arguments. The comments section is below—keep it friendly, or at the very least polite, and have at it!
Dan Persons has been knocking about the genre media beat for, oh, a good handful of years, now. He’s presently house critic for the radio show Hour of the Wolf on WBAI 99.5FM in New York, and previously was editor of Cinefantastiqueand Animefantastique, as well as producer of news updates for The Monster Channel. He is also founder of Anime Philadelphia, a program to encourage theatrical screenings of Japanese animation. And you should taste his One Alarm Chili! Wow!
“(Although, to be fair, a moment when Logan summons up a male on his Dial-a-Boink transporter and reacts with not much more than an expression of, “Nah, not tonight,” is remarkably restrained for the time.)”
I’ve seen this observation before, and it’s rather missing the point. The movie’s intent was to portray the city’s society as sexually decadent and immoral, a corrupt system that needed to be destroyed. So the culture’s acceptance of homosexuality and promiscuity wasn’t a progressive statement, it was a way of coding it as evil. Basically it was a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah doomed to destruction by its libertine ways, with Logan and Jessica learning “correct” nuclear-family values from Peter Ustinov and passing them on to the survivors.
As for the film as a whole, I agree it doesn’t quite work. I like the first act, which has impressive worldbuilding and does an excellent, deft job establishing its world and characters efficiently through natural-seeming expository dialogue. But it totally falls apart in the third act, with a ton of stuff that makes no sense.
Logan’s Run spawned a short-lived TV series in 1977, using stock footage, props, and costumes from the movie but rebooting the premise (since a direct sequel would never have worked what with the whole civilization collapsing at the end) and retooling it into a “weird post-apocalyptic culture of the week” template that seemed to be all the rage in the mid-’70s — see also the failed Gene Roddenberry pilots Genesis II and Planet Earth, their post-Roddenberry third attempt Strange New World, the live-action Saturday morning series Ark II, and the live-action and animated Planet of the Apes TV series that aired respectively in 1974 and ’75. The Logan series had Star Trek‘s D.C Fontana as story editor and had impressive single episodes written by David Gerrold and Harlan Ellison, though it was mediocre overall. The TV series radically retconned the premise by revealing that the City of Domes was secretly ruled by a cabal of elderly men, an elite class exempted from Carousel and oppressing the rest of the people. As it happens, I’m currently reviewing the series on my Patreon page, and I covered the book and movie too.
As for the cityscape, maybe some CH could make it look underwater…or hazy.
I could see this world coming after READY PLAYER ONE but before ARK II…they have the same feel. Ustinov I didn’t necessarily would look at in heteronormativity as much as, ironically—something new at the time…they had no concept of self-accrued wisdom…cell phone culture without the handheld devices.
No Ustinov—it winds up THX1138, or similar.
Shortly before this movie came out, I went to a panel discussion that consisted of Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl, Anne McCaffrey, Joe Haldeman, and Samuel Delaney. It was at department store, hosted by their book department, but before the discussion started, they had to show a trailer for “Logan’s Run.”
The audience seemed more amused than wowed by what we saw, and I remember McCaffrey saying “I grok,” at one point during the trailer, which sent everyone around me into gales of laughter.
I’ve never been tempted to see “Logan’s Run.”
For me the problem with Logan’s Run was that it looked and felt like a TV pilot. The ideas it presented were not explored deeply because it would have pushed the movie deeply into an R rating and so they were downplayed instead. The film was stuck with primitive digital effects and bad physical effects resulting in very sparkly small explosions from the laser guns and clucking floating robots casually cleaning up bodies. Not much better than you’d see on TV at the time. It does have the look of a Sci-Fi movie made by people with no understanding of the genre who were working with old ideas and tools.
Edit: Never mind, I already answered this one below.
1976 was an odd time for me.
I had turned 10 during the blah-centennial…had already seen every Trek episode…my mother telling me I wasn’t a little boy anymore.
Logan’s Run really did feel like the end of SF to me then.
It was the first sci-fi that felt a bit dangerous…before ALIEN or lightsaber amputations, the laser surgery bed going berserk was the most horrifying seen I had seen.
But while futurism was dying as Ustinov’s simpler ways of living (a proto-WALL-E), Lucas—while helping make space dangerous, also made things wonderous.
Star Wars gave me my second childhood before I had aged out of my first.
Otherwise I likely would have been into cars sports and dating like all the other “mundanes.”
Perhaps I would have been better off.
I remember seeing the movie once on TV sometime in the 80’s, and I read the book around that time too. I remember the book being interesting, but not particularly good, and the feel of both was that they were much older than they were. The main failure of the worldbuilding for me was the realization that if a society could do the things it was doing, it could handle the population growth.
Today, of course, we’re more worried about declining populations.
@3/GJL: “The film was stuck with primitive digital effects”
There was no such thing as “digital effects” in 1976. The first limited uses of computer animation in feature film were in 1982, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and TRON (the latter of which used mostly conventional hand animation passing as computer graphics, despite its pretense). Logan’s Run‘s visual effects were created entirely with optical film-processing techniques, physical miniatures and matte paintings, and the like, as well as some imaginative use of real holography in the interrogation scene at the climax. And they were hardly “primitive,” though they were fairly mediocre for the time. They were well-developed, sophisticated techniques that had been in use for decades (aside from the holograms, a technique I don’t think I’ve ever seen in any other film).
@4/wiredog: “The main failure of the worldbuilding for me was the realization that if a society could do the things it was doing, it could handle the population growth.”
This is somewhat more justifiable in the film than in the book. In the film, the society is restricted to one city in an otherwise uninhabitable world, and thus has no room for growth. At least, that’s what the ruling computers are programmed to assume.
The elephant in the room here is Ustinov’s ‘American’ accent. Is anybody going to bring this up? I mean, I’m Irish and even I winced.
Would really like to see the TV series again, though.
I seem to recall some sequels to the book. I vaguely recall Francis being the leader of Sanctuary (which was on Mars?) and also some sort of multi-versal or maybe time-travel plot lines. But I may have been stoned when I tried to read the books.
@@.-@: “Today, of course, we’re more worried about declining populations.”
Is that really a concern? I know there are some generational gap issues, especially in Japan I believe, where the older retiring workforce doesn’t have adequate replacement. But is there really a worry about declining populations overall? Some would argue (including myself) that the Earth is already overpopulated and that number continues to climb exponentially.
@8/Austin: The population is still growing, but the growth rate is declining (source: Our World in Data). As far as I am concerned, this is good news. Sure, there will be problems, but it seems to me that they can be solved, and that the advantages outweigh them by far.
@6/Aonghus Fallon: “The elephant in the room here is Ustinov’s ‘American’ accent. Is anybody going to bring this up?”
Isn’t the bigger question why Logan and Jessica (and Box) have English accents when everyone else in the city has American accents, and when the city is within walking distance of Washington, DC?
” the wastelands of…Virginia?”
To be fair, the Springfield area can be pretty dystopian during rush hour. And 1976 was before the DC suburbs expanded south as far as Fredericksburg and north as far as Baltimore.
I own this movie and watch it several times a year because it’s ENTERTAINING. Some movies are made as a commentary on life, this isn’t one of them. Of course the story reflects society’s current social mores just as the movie has the visual reflections of the time during which it’s made. That’s how storytelling and movie making work.
Stop analyzing it and WATCH it. Just sit down with a drink and a snack, put your feet up, and forget about your existence for two hours. If you can’t do that, then you’ve lost sight of the reason movies exist in the first place.
It’s a good flick, enjoy it!
The authors of the original novel ‘bragged’ that it was the first novel written solely to be made into a movie. That may be why the movie was so ‘meh’, for all the reasons you pointed out.
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There’s the whole “Jessica watches Logan and Francis fight each other without doing a single thing to help Logan” helpless-female thing, which drives me crazy, but my biggest problem is the end: The city has fallen apart, and the kids are so enraptured by seeing an actual old man they ignore the fact that they’re all going to die because they have no idea how to build houses, grow food, or survive without their technology.
On the other hand, Jenny Agutter. *Sigh*
@14/David Morgan: “The authors of the original novel ‘bragged’ that it was the first novel written solely to be made into a movie. That may be why the movie was so ‘meh’, for all the reasons you pointed out.”
I don’t think that follows, because the movie is not faithful to the novel except in very broad strokes. Indeed, I think it improves on the novel in a number of ways. The novel is a globe-spanning dystopia where people remember the world’s history, and people’s scheduled death is brought about simply by euthanasia drugs. The movie’s domed arcology with its color-coded robes and forgotten past and elaborate Carousel ritual is entirely an innovation of the film and is far more interesting. Also, Francis is a completely different and far fuller character in the film; the novel’s version is barely even an onscreen character and has no relationship with Logan.
The two versions also differ quite a bit in Logan’s story arc. As mentioned in the article, the novel’s Logan chooses on his own initiative to infiltrate and destroy the Runners as his final blaze of glory, and only switches sides at the end. The movie’s Logan is assigned to infiltrate the Runners and it’s ambiguous when and why he switches sides, though my best guess is that it’s because he falls in love with Jessica and chooses to shoot his fellow Sandmen to save her. (In the TV series, Logan is genuinely questioning his society from the start and has already been identified as a potential recruit by Jessica, and he saves her from the Sandmen and flees with her mere moments after meeting her.)
The film follows roughly the same plot structure as the book up through the Box sequence, but much more compactly and shallowly, although at least it feels like a meaningful progression toward the outside world rather than just a random series of picaresque episodes as in the novel. The film then mercifully leaves out a number of the book’s further meandering, sometimes quite distasteful or pointless interludes (like the one where a band of rebels called “gypsies” forces both Logan and Jessica to have sex with all their opposite-sex members, which Logan enjoys considerably more than Jessica does, or the bizarre extended digression into a robotic reenactment of the American Civil War). The ending is also completely different.
Honestly, if Nolan and Johnson intended their book to be a movie, I don’t think they had a great sense of movie storytelling, since the book is a meandering mess, a series of random episodes that just goes on until it stops. It would probably have been prohibitively expensive in its scope as well. It has some beautiful prose, but I think the movie improves on it, and I say that as someone who’s lukewarm on the movie.
I watched this movie on a Sunday afternoon on tv. I’ve never read the book. It was a good Sunday afternoon movie. I always thought they chose 30 as your expiration date from the expression never trust anyone over 30. It’s a very 70’s movie worried about over population and dystopian futures along with it’s color pallet. My biggest complaint was the future looked like a shopping mall. The resolution is fine, Sanctuary is not real but there is life outside the dome and you don’t have to die at 30. Oh and there are cats! Lots of cats. I enjoyed the few episodes of the tv show I saw when it ran on SYFY. My favorite character was Donald Moffat he played a middle aged looking android. Gregory Harrison before he became Gonzo on Trapper John was Logan and in his late 20’s as was Heather Menzies . You might recognize her from the Sound of Music as Louisa.
#7 I think you are thinking of the 1977 TV series “Fantastic Journey”. I would not be surprised if the same set designers and prop managers worked on both. Often had very similar looks and a lot of shooting in the same California hills. A family lost in time and space keeps running into different civilizations. One of the group is either an alien or from the far future.
So, okay, I should have said “manually done optical precursors to digital effects” but the point remains that the special effects were not done with a great deal of care. Consider that the vast majority of the actors and essentially all of the extras were wearing unfitted sack dresses and cheap slippers.
@1: The movie’s intent was to portray the city’s society as sexually decadent and immoral
You make a good case for this, but I can also see it as an attempt to subdue a society by trapping them in an extended adolescence. Think in terms of Romero’s Zombie movies which criticized the consumer culture. The general populace of the city as being not allowed the decision to be good or bad.
Basically I agree with Dan Person in that this is a mishandled story. Could have been so much better however so many aspects were handled poorly including the special effects but also the lack of delving into the possible motivation of the characters.
@19/Bill: No, wiredog is referring to the prose sequels Logan’s World and Logan’s Search. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run#Sequels_and_spin-offs
It’s true that The Fantastic Journey was the series that producer Leonard Katzman and story editor D.C. Fontana worked on immediately before Logan’s Run, and it had a number of the same writers and guest actors. It also used a number of the same locations (e.g. the Griffith Observatory and Busch Gardens), but had mostly different art staffers aside from cinematographer Irving Lippman and the aptly named set decorator Linda DeScenna. They were from different production companies; TFJ was a Columbia show on NBC and LR was an MGM show on CBS.
“A family lost in time and space keeps running into different civilizations. One of the group is either an alien or from the far future.”
Not quite. In the TFJ pilot, it was a scientist, his son (Ike Eisenmann), and three of his assistants, plus Jared Martin’s Varian, a human from a 22nd-century utopia. But they expanded and reworked the pilot into 2 hours, dropping half the cast after the first hour and keeping only Martin, Eisenmann, and Carl Franklin, and subsequently adding Katie Saylor in the back half of the pilot. The episode after that featured Roddy McDowall as the villain, but softened him up at the end so that he could join as a series regular. So ultimately none of the travelers were related to each other (and the way they excused having the father go home and abandon his son halfway through the pilot was very clumsy).
You might be confusing TFJ with the similar 1985 series Otherworld, which did center on a family.
“My biggest complaint was the future looked like a shopping mall. “
I’ve been to the future, and it is a shopping mall…
It’s certainly not a perfect movie, but a lot of the complaints aren’t about the movie, but the era. Of course the effects weren’t great – it was before CGI, so the effects were all ‘practical’, and it was a year before Star Wars ratched up the SF movie budgets/effects. That being said, the holograms, notably, actually were real holograms – I saw them in person in a museum display at the time, the guns fired real flames, Box was a man in a huge robot costume, the city was a surprisingly huge construction (https://simotron.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/logans-run-city-model/), etc. And, yes, they shot in futuristic locations (a shopping mall, and the Water Gardens in Fort Worth), but that’s pretty typical of relatively big budget SF of the era before – where would SF be without The Bradbury Building, Bronson Canyon, Point Dume State Beach, or of course Vasquez Rocks! Given that it was released a year before Star Wars I think it’s pretty silly to say that Logan’s Run killed 70’s Science Fiction Movies in 1976, when Star Wars came out in 1977, which arguably triggered a huge boom in Science Fiction films. Were Science Fiction movies “dead” for the 11 months between the two? Sure, headlines are just for click bait, but that was just silly.
Came in to bluster “You’re wrong,” but I don’t think you are. This is a cromulent lens. There are others, but you did a good job with this one.
@23/Laird A Popkin: “Of course the effects weren’t great – it was before CGI, so the effects were all ‘practical’, and it was a year before Star Wars ratched up the SF movie budgets/effects.”
There were plenty of great FX movies before CGI, and there have been countless inept FX movies using CGI. So the availability or lack of CGI had nothing to do with it. The reason there are so many badly done CGI movies is because of this myth that CGI is automatically a superior technique. Like any tool, it’s only as good as the artists wielding it.
“I think it’s pretty silly to say that Logan’s Run killed 70’s Science Fiction Movies in 1976, when Star Wars came out in 1977, which arguably triggered a huge boom in Science Fiction films.”
I think the intent is that Logan’s Run was the last gasp of the dystopian style of SF filmmaking that characterized most of the 1970s, while Star Wars, despite being released in the ’70s, pioneered the style of SF/fantasy filmmaking that would dominate the 1980s. (Though I would say it was both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)
Although that’s probably an overstatement, because there were later films in a similar dystopian vein, e.g. Damnation Alley, Mad Max, and even Alien.
I could not disagree with you more. Logan’s Run is as important a classic as any of those from the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. Including 2001, Planet of the Apes, Star Wars and Close Encounters. You missed so, so much as did others here in the comment section. And I don’t have the time to write a 10 page analysis at this time.
When I was going to cons in the late 70s there was a thing of tween kids acting out the movie, running around the hotel halls chasing and sometimes catching each other. We called them Runnies. Old fans like my dad were cross because this could get us into trouble with the hotel, and I think they were eventually told to cut it out.
But I remember thinking that if I were 14 or so, it would be great fun to run with a band of others my age, and then fall down in a heap with them, especially if I were to happen to fall down on top of that cute guy I had a crush on. I now know someone who was a Runnie and she confirmed that was a big part of the appeal.
@28/Elizabeth Vixen Fox: Holy cow, you mean that Wonder Woman episode with all the Logan’s Run cosplayers at the sci-fi convention was based on reality? I thought they were just pretending it was popular because it was a CBS show so they had the rights to use the name and paraphernalia.
I would have almost been a teen when I first saw this movie, but I was entranced. It was a very entertaining movie then, and it would be quite an entertaining movie now – I know that there has been a lot of noise to get it remade.
However, as far as I am concerened, major parts of the move WERE remade, in perhaps the best Michael Bay movie, The Island (2005). Whilst the plot diverges greatly around a third of the way through, there was a lot of similarities in the first third that I almost thought it was a remake as I watched it. It’s quite interesting to contrast and compare these two movies. I do hope they do a remake of Logan’s Run – I’m looking forwards to seeing a ‘new generation’, which is completely in line with the themes of the story….
My impression when first watching it: In the future there will bo no fuses.
The most astonishing thing to me is that it was rated PG. The subject matter and nudity would stretch what’s acceptable for an R rating today, and probably push it to NC17. What that says about the last 45 years in America is an article all in itself.
It seems like a lot of the individual ideas here work but they don’t necessarily add up. Society was shifting from a perspective related to tearing down prior worldview contexts and norms, into one of building up a new perspective and society. Just as Star Wars started that worldbuilding, which matched well with a new look and feel to the 80s cultured that followed, other earlier period films like Lathe of Heaven and Soylent Green combined futuristic and dystopian themes. The 50s had started a new form of brave new world that wasn’t seen as heading in a positive direction, at least in the 70s, even though the design aesthetic, physical appeal of goods, and increased convenience themes all worked. It’s no wonder, given the promise of nuclear power didn’t work out and the Cold War hung over everyone’s head.
This focuses on the old movie aesthetic being inferior instead of acknowledging those shifts. Mad Max came later, but it was cooler, balancing grittiness and personal storytelling instead of relying on broader and cheesier narratives. Society had just broken down for some reason, and that worked.
This was the first film I reviewed for my college newspaper as a real critic, receiving the press kit from the studio, watching a special screening.
Given the materials sent to me (plot synopsis, crew list, glossy production photos, actor biographies, etc) it is apparent that the studio was in earnest.
But the film itself was awful. SF cliche throughout, predictable, with disjointed pacing and a cartoon robot stuck right into the middle of it all.
Ustinov made us all laugh.
I can’t find a copy of my original review (not even in the paper’s archives which are sadly incomplete) but I do recall saying something along the lines of this film being a perfect example of why science fiction was not being taken seriously by the studios.
How has this group of film-literate folk engaged thus far in a conversation about Logan’s Run and not even mentioned Zardoz?
Logans Run was made in response to the environmental awareness that was starting to creep into the social consciousness of the country atvthe time. Its a protest against consumerism and a throw away society. Its idea that at some time in the future the government made a decision to create a self sufficent society to perserve mankind from its self desructive tendencies is very 70s in its thinking. Polution and over population plus food shortages where very hot topics. Its simply a reflection of those ideas. I belive its important to view it in that context.
@30/PetarB: It’s interesting that you perceive Bay’s The Island as a pseudo-remake of Logan’s Run, because it was sued for plagiarism by the makers of a different ’70s movie, Parts: The Clonus Horror.
@32/Jeremy Turnley: “The most astonishing thing to me is that it was rated PG. The subject matter and nudity would stretch what’s acceptable for an R rating today, and probably push it to NC17.”
It’s nowhere near NC-17. That would require explicit sex, graphic gory violence, hardcore drug use, that sort of thing. The brief nude scenes would probably earn an R by today’s standards, but the rest is strictly PG-13.
“What that says about the last 45 years in America is an article all in itself.”
It’s less about “America” and more about marketing and shifting perceptions. It used to be that the G rating, “general,” meant simply that — films suitable for all ages, child to adult. PG was meant for films with mature content that some parents might be less okay showing to their kids than others, while R was for films more clearly unsuitable for children. But the meanings shifted over time. The G rating took on a stigma of being for children only and hurt films’ box office, so many films started sticking in the odd random “hell” or “damn” to get a PG rating when they were otherwise perfectly suitable for G. So PG started to drift more toward films that were mostly all-ages, and that led to the introduction of the PG-13 rating to distinguish the more intense ones. But PG-13 did better at the box office than R, so films that would otherwise be R-rated shaved off bits of content here and there to sneak over into the PG-13 category. And then PG ended up being seen the same way G had once been seen, so people started putting in more cussing and violence and stuff to get PG-13 ratings. So with the constant gaming of the system in both directions, PG-13 has sprawled out to cover most films and the other ratings just keep getting squeezed into narrower niches.
So PG today basically corresponds to the same kind of content as many G-rated films in the past, and PG-13 today corresponds roughly to PG back then — except that back then you could get a degree of non-sexual nudity in a PG film (e.g. this one or Clash of the Titans) that you probably couldn’t get in a PG-13 film today.
All of which basically renders the rating system useless for the purpose it was meant to serve, because it’s meant to offer guidance on the level of content you can expect, but the definitions have changed so much since it was instituted that it’s become actively misleading for older movies — while PG-13 has become uselessly broad for current movies. At least they’ve added more specific content notations for individual films.
My friends and I all loved the movie when it came out, though I’d likely be bored with it now. It was a silly spectacle, not unlike the other silly spectacle sf movies of the era. Most of those don’t hold up to close scrutiny either, or really any scrutiny at all.
I first saw Logan’s Run not long after it came out. I enjoyed the movie back then. I did think it had plot holes. Even at my young age, I didn’t find the premise of getting rid of everyone over thirty viable. I thought the most powerful scene came at the end where they met the old man. I also didn’t believe the only people who survived would mostly look and act like white Americans (except for the sexy accent of Michael York).
Even back then, I found the way they presented the female characters (the “helpless chick” trope) tiresome, as I did with most movies until recent years. I quit watching movies and tv for many years because I was so done with the stereotypes. I wanted to see the women hold their own, kick butt, be heroes, save the sexy dudes, all of that.
But I was still young enough then that I enjoyed it. The movie entertained me and I loved science fiction.
I saw it again a few decades later and thought it was silly. I couldn’t watch more than the first 20-30 minutes. The idea of killing everyone at age thirty is just too stupid. I mean, seriously? It makes no sense. I don’t believe for one moment that a society based on that premise would last for more than a few months after the “death date” of the first generation. Like people are going to obediently go to their deaths en mass or not realize what is happening. Nor would the society work, not when you’re killing off everyone just as they are becoming productive members of society. I couldn’t suspend disbelief that the only surviving humans on the entire planet want no more than to party all the time. Populations aren’t that monochrome.
Part of why I liked it as a girl was because, well, Michael York. I thought he was hot. And I’m surprised no one has mentioned Farah Fawcett. She didn’t have much of a role, but her part stuck with me more than anyone else in the movie. At the time I remember thinking that her role vastly underrated her ability, that she should have had a more significant part. Not surprisingly, she really came into her own as an actor in the following decades. I also recall thinking “That incredible hair!” My young, bright-eyed self was impressed.
Logans run was first introduced to me in a public library basement film projector viewing in the late 1970’s after star wars began its second year on the big screen. I was born in 71 and also had just discovered heavy metal the movie and graphic magazine and had begun absorbing any sci fi novel I could find at library books sales – old grand masters and new age 70’s takes – h. Beam piper and his future histories started with a dog eared copy of little fuzzy wich advertised starship troopers…
Loans run is imperfect and has not aged well but as it introduced me to new vistas and.concepts as a.child I still hold it dear to my heart.
The 20 or so sci fi movies after starters were studios tried to jump on its bandwagon and grab the publics money contain some truly awful dogs that never should have been shown in theaters and they claim the sobriquet of poor film to me rather than logans run and its ilk. For years it was shown on broadcast antenna uhf television Sunday morning broadcasts and it has never entirely lost the sheen and thrill it gave me as a young boy in the late 70’s.
There were at least a dozen novels in the series but all were thin trade pulp paperbacks and poorly written in my opinion. Runner and sandman have been with me in my mind since first glimpsed on screen.
Star Wars was NOT fun. It was excruciatingly, aggressively stupid. It wrecked SF film making for a generation. Everything now had to blaster effects spectaculars, and we didn’t really start to escape from that bullshit until Blade Runner and Alien.
I saw Star Wars the week it came out, and left the theater shaking my head and mumbling “That sucked ass.” I’ve been baffled ever since. For years, I listed all the reasons it sucked: cardboard characters, mechanical, hackneyed plot, and the response was always the same — but the special effects are great!
Yeah, well, you can’t make a story from special effects. If the plot is just a device for moving you from one effect to the next, it is a bad movie. And that is pretty much what it was.
Logan’s Run was not a great movie. It had kind of a dumb premise. But it was a mediocre film in an era of great films, and after Star Wars everything became Star Wars. Nerts to that.
Oddly what I remember best about Logan’s Run is the sequence where he picks Jessica off the ‘available for casual sex channel’ and didn’t get annoyed when she says she’s changed her mind. Instead he makes her tea and listens to why she’s upset.
Logan’s Run was probably the last dystopian SF movie before Star Wars made SF films fun again. It was indeed a product of its time and I’m glad I’m not the only one who remembers that Farrah Fawcett was in this.
As a teenager in the 70’s, I was mostly focused on Jenny Agutter, rather than on the political and social undertones of the day. As a sci fi junkie, I enjoyed the premise of the story.
I think this is pretty unfair to Logan’s Run… it killed ’70s science fiction? Seems to me you are not giving enough credit to things such as the over-abundance of other films painting the picture of the civilizations replacing us after our civilization falls. I mean things like those Gene Roddenberry pilots you mentioned (there were three… Genesis II, Planet Earth and Strange New World), the Planet of the Ape films (and the TV show), Zardoz (I mean, I like– maybe love– Zardoz but many people seem to hold something against it) other movies already in production when Star Wars premiered like Damnation Alley or End of the World. It isn’t like the strange new world after man’s inevitable nuclear apocalypse genre disappeared after Logan’s Run or science fiction became suddenly more hopeful… Did not the 1970s close with that feel good civilization is collapsing around us hit Mad Max?
I kind of get the feeling you just don’t like Logan’s Run… and that is fair.
@50/Michael Lauck: “Seems to me you are not giving enough credit to things such as the over-abundance of other films painting the picture of the civilizations replacing us after our civilization falls.”
On the contrary, I think that’s rather the point — that Logan came along at a time when that trend was already past its prime, and the combination of its high profile and its lackluster critical reception (though it did well at the box office) was a harbinger that the genre was played out. Or something like that. I agree the headline’s phrasing is kind of clickbaity.
” I mean things like those Gene Roddenberry pilots you mentioned (there were three… Genesis II, Planet Earth and Strange New World)”
Roddenberry was only involved with the first two of those. The third was a retool MGM developed on their own without him (though with his permission), keeping John Saxon from Planet Earth and the broad strokes of the premise, but changing the character names and specifics. It was the worst of the three by a huge margin. (Here’s my blog review.)
“The city has fallen apart, and the kids are so enraptured by seeing an actual old man they ignore the fact that they’re all going to die because they have no idea how to build houses, grow food, or survive without their technology. “
See also WALL-E.
I remember catching bits and pieces of this on TV as a young teen. In the end, I wound up reading the book to make sense of things. It didn’t help all that much. It’s a toss up on which Box is worse. Everyone who tried to escape and live has actually been killed and frozen for consumption vs Box the depraved robot artist who kills his subjects but hasn’t killed many runners.
However, I liked finding out book Francis was secretly the oldest man on Earth and using his position as a sandman to help people escape.
The sequel, where they promptly killed off all the other runners who’d escaped, Francis, and Jaq, didn’t work for me. Although, I still remember the little girl on drugs whose robot doll might despise her but seems to be the only thing keeping her alive. It was disturbing but memorable.
Rollerball is better, despite lacking Jenny Augutter
Stand on top of LR and you can just about see AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT in the distance…
I think there is an awful lot in the film Logan’s Run to perhaps learn and take note. It’s a clever film indeed.
From the moment that Michael York becomes a runner himself and the fear and realism hits him along with the computer heart beating faster music playing out as if he is panicking that he has found out no one renews and he has been living a lie and now he has become a runner and 4 years has been taken off of his life clock.
The whole film is a hard hitting film to be honest and it really covers some dark topics and fears.
Spiritual awakenings come to mind with Logan’s run also.
It touches on close friendships and how they can change along with peoples attitudes and how the viewpoint has changed now that Logan is a runner and Francis is not as Logan tries to speak and get reassurance from Francis in the whirlpool bath scene
But to no avail as Francis is more interested to carry on living in his dream existence.
Until a person does walk in someone else’s shoes as they say.
Logan’s run for me was a childhood film that stuck with me and was quite disturbing for me watching it thinking of a population of people expanding on a blue ball and being crammed into small areas to be told the earth is overpopulated and population worries some 50 years later.
Housing issues and lack of in 2024 etc etc.
Take what you want from the film but it certainly provokes some deep thinking even almost 50 years later.