Logan's Run

Some old movies make it easy to put yourself in the time it was made. Something about the way they’re made, the authenticity of the look, the believability of it all, makes it easy to enjoy. Logan’s Run is not one of those movies. Despite the fact that it is set hundreds of years in the future, it is definitively of the 1970’s. The color palate, the acting, the directing, everything about it reeks of the worst side of the 70’s, the cliches and tropes that have become retroactive punchlines. Anybody that watches it for the first time and can refrain from cringing is made of sterner stuff than I. The first Star Wars and Star Trek movies and Soylent Green don’t feel as corny as this. It’s also got a story that is, at best, wonky and unevenly told. Diversions into weird psychedelic harems, every set piece feeling like a level in a video game (seriously, there’s a water level, an ice level, an industrial level, a grassy plains level … it’s like Super Mario), a weird focus on gadgets but not fleshing out the details of them … Logan’s Run is just WEIRD. And yet, the corniness has a certain earnest charm to it. This movie may be as of the time as it gets, but it isn’t for lack of trying to make a timeless vision of the future. There’s something charming about how goofy and honest it is. They wanted to make an epic, and while it may never even come close to achieving its goals, I couldn’t help but find stupid fun in the way it trips over itself in the attempt. I don’t know who was supposed to find the weird upward-turning-cyclone thing that is the Carousell scene anything but laughable, or not wonder how they’d top themselves after the LSD arcade orgy that actually, literally slows down the film, as in the frame rate itself … and then comes an arctic cave overseen by a malfunctioning robot … and then the outside world. It’s bonkers, but in that throwing-everything-against-the-wall way where you’re almost impressed the movie has the balls to keep burning through the ideas. So, it’s not a great movie. It’s barely a good movie. But it’s so ridiculous and so overstuffed with half-baked ideas, it’s amusing. It may not have been the intention, but it’s what I got out of it.