Dir. Douglas Trumbull, co-written, interestingly, by "Deer Hunter"'s Michael Cimino. This was a way better idea than execution, and it kind of kills me, because half of me really wants to use it in a class about seventies environmentalism or environmental disaster or ecophagy (new word I learned from the Wiki entry I read on "Screamers"!), but the other half of me knows that the undergrad mind would not easily handle the sections where Bruce Dern, wearing a druid-esque gown, communes in the garden with bunnies and the box-of-junk-looking robots he talks to. Why, Trumbull, why?
Dern is a biologist who's responsible for maintaining a giant spaceship which holds several biospheres. The ship, one of a fleet, is charged with saving what's left of non-human nature from the "poisoned soil" of Earth. The thing is, nobody except Dern's character cares anymore about non-human nature. His three co-workers on the ship are yahoos who only like to run around in little go-karts, trampling the gardens, and are ecstatic when the decision comes from Earth to jettison all of the biospheres and return home so the ships can be put back into commercial transport. Dern kills all of them in order to save some non-human nature, although he does have sad, guilty second thoughts about having done so.
The movie is very careful to make sure that you think of Dern's character as just as much of a man as the yahoo crewmembers (he can beat them at poker, and he beats them in a fight). Just because he eats cantalope instead of the processed food provided for them doesn't mean that he doesn't have testicles, etc. Ha! I love the seventies. Total disconnect between human and non-human nature; burly yet caring man; nerdy proto-robotics technology fetish.
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