Michael Anderson, “Logan’s Run” (1976)
Admittedly this film has not aged well over the past half-century: its sets look bad; its music soundtrack turns tired and terrible in later scenes; its pacing is poor; the script is bad; and the cast of actors leaves much to be desired. All the same though, there is plenty of food for thought in “Logan’s Run”, especially in its exposition of an apparently utopian urban society in which people live for pleasure, with every whim and desire of theirs catered to by technology. The catch is that for this society to function the way it does, it must be a completely closed society, insulated from all outside influences, and within that society (completely controlled by a central computer) everyone is brainwashed into believing that, at the age of 30 years, all citizens will experience renewal in a ritual called “Carrousel”, in which all are taken up into a vortex created by the central computer. Those who refuse to participate in this renewal are labelled Runners and may be subject to arrest and termination by elite hunters known as Sandmen.
One such Sandman is Logan 5 (Michael York) who, after terminating a Runner and finding an ankh pendant in the man’s clothing, takes it to the computer for analysis. The computer tells him the ankh is a symbol for the Sanctuary, the place where all Runners try to escape to, and tasks him with a mission to find the Sanctuary and destroy it. To do this though, Logan must become a Runner himself and the computer promptly adds four years to his age – refusing (of course) to answer Logan when he asks if he’ll get his four years back if he is successful in his mission. With the help of a young woman called Jessica (Jenny Agutter), Logan meets with an underground group of Runners who lead him to the city boundaries. Logan’s Sandman colleague Francis (Richard Jordan), convinced that Logan has joined the Runners, pursues him and Jessica with the zeal of a religious fanatic.
After various adventures through the city’s underbelly and food stores – the latter in which Logan and Jessica discover an unpleasant truth about the food they’ve been eating – the two emerge into the outside world, seeing the sun for the first time, and journey through a landscape that itself had once been the city of Washington DC. There, they meet an elderly man (Peter Ustinov) who tells Logan of what he remembers of the last days of human civilisation before a global catastrophe, and at this point Logan realises that the Sanctuary people have been pursuing is a myth.
Based on the novel of the same name, “Logan’s Run” clearly had potential to explore and interrogate the nature of the social contract between governments and the general public, and what people might be prepared to give up for governments to deliver a society based on an all-encompassing social welfare system catering to every physical need. In Logan’s society, people are required to sacrifice their lives at a young age, in effect becoming a permanently infantile community basking in ignorance with no knowledge of their past or how they have come to be what they are. The hedonistic nature of Logan’s society reflects concerns people in the 1970s had about the direction society was supposedly going in, with more people being able to share in and enjoy social prosperity, and the apparent loosening of traditions and morality that was believed to be occurring. In other words, despite being a science fiction film set in the distant future, “Logan’s Run” expresses a socially conservative mindset. The level of mind and social control evinced in the film gives the future city society the feel and fabric of a religious cult.
The early part of the film is interesting enough, with plenty of character development and enough show-and-tell of how the utopian society runs (and is run by technology), and Logan’s gradual evolution from a believer and enforcer of the law to a rebel and outsider seems quite credible. Unfortunately, once Logan and Jessica have escaped the city, the plot is all at sea with the two unable to find Sanctuary. Once Logan understands what Sanctuary actually is, the realisation (which should have hit him like a bolt out of the blue) compels him to take drastic action that sweeps him, Jessica, and the old man onto a collision path with the city. However, once the film has reached the climactic moment (heralded by rather laughable pyrotechnics), Logan, Jessica, their new friend and other people find themselves in a new dilemma: how are they able to survive and thrive with no knowledge or experience of the outside world?
Those familiar with Plato’s philosophy will of course recognise the allegory of the cave, with Logan in the position of the freed prisoner who chooses to step outside the cave and experience reality for the first time, in the later half of the film. What Logan does next appears very admirable – trying to share the truth he finds with others – but perhaps the irony is that what he does results in a new catastrophe after which humanity will have to build a new society from scratch. That society may or may not be as technologically dependent as the one he and Jessica have known, but the issue of centralised control to the extent of dominating people’s minds and thoughts, essentially manipulating them and indoctrinating them with a repressive ideology, remains a problem.
In spite of its flaws, “Logan’s Run” posits very intriguing and quite troubling questions about the relationship between governments and the people they govern, the role that technology might play in this relationship, and what sacrifices governments might demand of the governed if the people prefer security and comfort over freedom and responsibility for their own lives.