Logan’s Run (movie review)

• Title: Logan’s Run
• Year: 1976
• Rating: PG
• Director: Michael Anderson
• Writer(s): David Zelag Goodman (novel: William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson)
• Cast: Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov

In a far-future computer-controlled city in which life ends at thirty, Logan’s job is to kill those who would escape the system. But as he learns more about a mysterious sanctuary beyond the city walls, he too seeks escape and goes on the run.

Rewind . . .

. . . I suspect there is an entire generation of people — most especially men, most especially of the geeky persuasion — who couldn’t help but think of Logan’s Run when their own thirtieth birthday rolled around. The famous premise of the film is, of course, that this far future hedonistic paradise where life is pleasant and all things can be had in abundance comes with one strict and immutable law — when you turn thirty, you check out. That’s when your lifeclock, the little color-coded crystal embedded in the palm of all the city’s citizens, starts flashing red, and you know it is time to report to Carousel and your own death. Of course, those who follow the rules and don’t make waves have some hope for renewal in the form of rebirth — the rest are destroyed.

In a time long before my own thirtieth birthday, watching Logan’s Run as a wee lad on one of those cable channels with lots of commercials and station identification breaks, thirty years probably didn’t strike me as too unreasonable, as it seemed some infinitely far away and unknowable time. Sure, I disagreed with it in principle, but really thirty was as much as an abstraction to me as fifty, both ages may as well have been the same. I have to wonder what the effect on all of us kids — and here I maintain it to be essentially impossible to have grown up in the 80s and not seen a rerurn of Logan’s Run chopped judiciously to make room for more commercials — if the original idea from William F. Nolan’s and George Clayton Johnson’s novel had been used, in which death comes at age twenty-one.

But I knew nothing of the book then (and still have not read it), though I could see that Logan’s Run was full of all the good, sensawunda stuff I liked in a movie. Future dystopias, high tech pistols, robots, a post-apocalyptic world, (and, as childhood morphed into teenagerdom, a scantily-clad Jenny Agutter started to command at least as much attention as the gee-whiz elements) — in short it had all the vitamins and minerals needed for a growing geek boy. It’s impossible to say how many times I watched the mangled TV version, but I do remember actually renting the movie once and seeing it uncut at some point and being able to immerse myself in the story in a way that I could not before.

The story, of course, follows Logan 5 and Jessica 6 on an episodic journey through their domed city and beyond, into the post-apocalyptic world of the far future United States, all in search of the fabled sanctuary. Despite the rather heavy elements of soulless authoritarianism, ruthless population enforcement, and a world in ruins, Logan’s Run somehow maintains a light, but not frivolous, touch. The eclectic music and arresting visuals further enhance the overall style of the film, and give it a borderline campy quality that is both fun and immersive. Logan’s world of the city is convincingly its own reality — effective even today, when some of the interiors seem more like the dressed up hotels or shopping malls they probably were — and anyone willing to meet the film halfway will have no trouble suspending disbelief and going along for the ride. Logan’s Run is a great example of 70s SF that knew how to balance big-wow visuals and continuous action with thought-provoking and socially relevant story elements.

Fast Forward . . .

. . . to a time when I’m past my renewal date and, needless to say, I have a pretty different perspective on Logan’s Run. If anything, the premise is even more horrifying, not merely because I now realize just how short thirty years is, but also because I see one of the points of the film that was not quite evident to me as a kid. And that is that Logan’s society is a completely adolescent one, one totally unmoored from either a past or a future, and one that exits as a complete dependency of the state. It’s bread and circuses, circa 2250, and an all-youth culture in which thirty isn’t just over-the-hill, but six-feet-under. The pretty world of Logan’s domed city is like a cross between A Brave New World and The City and the Stars, techno-authoritarianism overlaying aimless hedonism. It’s terrifying when you reflect on it, especially now, and it calls to mind elements of a more and more plausible future.

But that doesn’t make it a realistic film, it’s more of a fable, at least to contemporary eyes. The somewhat clunky, final quarter of so of the movie in which Logan and Jessica eventually make their way to the overgrown ruins of Washington DC seems both heavy handed and a little aimless, as if seeing the National Mall, the Lincoln Memorial, and an antiquated looking interior of the Capitol Building deserted and broken were enough to convey a message all by themselves. It seems like a page borrowed from Planet of the Apes, and feels a bit too particular and out of place with the rest of the film. Still, it’s a necessary sequence, even if it does spend too much time winking at the audience.

If I had one major disappointment upon rewatching the film, it would be in the characterization of Logan himself. Here, York’s performance is not to blaim — in fact it’s his performance that points in a direction unfortunately not taken in the film. Early on we see the sadistic glee with with Logan pursues runners trying to escape the execution of Carousel and Last Day, and we see to his almost childlike arrogance and selfishness as one of the City’s chosen ones. For a good part of his run, Logan is in fact a double agent trying to find the organization that assists the runners in escaping the city — he even brings the hammer down on one such group hiding out underground. But there are never really any hard consequences to any of this, no reckoning, and Logan hardly even shows remorse or self-awareness as he moves from undercover runner to the real thing. The humanizing influence of his romance with Jessica, and the implications of the lies and manipulation the remnants of the human race have lived under change his motivations, but don’t seem to scratch the surface of his character. He never even confesses the truth of his earlier deception to the woman he has fallen in love with.

So, if the spectacle outweighs the script in Logan’s Run, I think we can be satisfied that it is the big story that is really being told here, and not the personal journey of any one player. Logan’s Run is more about concepts than people — even if they are very human concepts — and those big ideas are satisfyingly more than just window dressing for a fun action movie, if only barely. Watch it for the nostalgia and impressive designs, and watch it too as part of that fine tradition of future earth societies depicted to the very limits of the extrapolative imagination and effects technology of a certain time and place. Logan’s Run is as much about the 70s as about the future, and is enjoyable both as a story of another era, and as part of the history of imaginative cinema.

• Nostalgia Rating: Huge
• Rewatch Potential: Moderate
• Wilhelm Scream?: No
• Unexpected Cameo: None, really; but why did it take me two plus decades to realize that Francis 7, Duncan Idaho, and Lo Armistead were all the same guy?
• Verdict: A must-watch seventies sci-fi classic that shows its age and has its flaws, but is nevertheless compelling on multiple levels.

What I Learned: That paradise has a price, and that retro-scifi can be a whole ‘nother class of cool.

Top Marks: The look. An appealing melange of borderline camp and futurist disco; everything from the outfits and hair styles, to the smooth minimalist lines of the sets, screams the 70s. While many of the Oscar-winning effects, impressive at the time, are now dated and quaint (the huge leap that was the ILM revolution of Star Wars was still a year away), it is the design that still appeals. Logan’s Run is a feast for the eyes, both for its imaginative and colorful visuals, and in its preservation of what a past era thought the future might look like. It’s this look that is a big part of what makes Logan’s Run so fun and watchable to this day.

If (When) It’s Remade: With a stinger of a branding premise (life ends at thirty!), it should come as no surprise that Logan’s Run has been circulating as potential remake fodder for years. There was a short-lived TV series (and I think I may have caught a few episodes, it seems familiar), and some other properties, but no reboot. Yet. IMDB has one tentatively slated for 2012 . . . but in Hollywood years that’s a bit like saying ‘wait till you’re thirty’ to an eight year old. No doubt the reboot will have all the CGI, gratuitous video-game style action, and ‘gritty realism’ we’ve all come to know and love in modern scifi movies.

Final Thoughts: Logan’s Run is both a science fiction and a ‘scifi’ movie, if one is to split hairs over the definition of those terms. Compared to Star Wars, the space opera that came along only a year later and would change the way imaginative films were made forever, Logan’s Run seems dated. But not just in the effects department, but in the whole approach to story telling. Star Wars, in seeking to be a modern myth, tapped into deeply unconscious elements of heroic storytelling and did so in a way that elevated plot above all things. Logan’s Run, like a lot of 70s SF, took a different approach — instead of narrative slight-of-hand, it was all about drawing attention to the things it wanted the audience to think about. While Star Wars offers some thematic depth, Logan’s Run has an appealing intellectual element that raises questions about overpopulation, freedom vs responsibility, religion and authority, human nature, and the ideal society. It can be dumb and smart at the same time in a way that, in our age where scifi is just another word for action movie, seems an artifact of a simultaneously more and less innocent filmic tradition.

More Reviews of Logan’s Run

This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.