Would you like to read a review of a movie that you'll probably never get to see and one that no one else has reviewed yet anywhere on the net? If your answer is yes then bookmark this page, take a coffee break or schedule yourself some uninterrupted time because you're about to feast your eyes on the world's first review of the Logan's Run movie that Bryan Singer almost got made!
One year before Star Wars burst on to cinema screens around the world we got an unexpected gem of a science fiction film called Logan's Run. It was the summer of 1976 and Jaws was frightening people in darkened movie theaters and drive-ins across the land, forever scarring a whole generation of kids to be scared of going for a swim in their backyard pool. Unlike most of the earlier sci-fi films from the first-half of the '70s, Logan's Run gave us a vision of an idyllic world where good-looking young men and women had fun living in a series of futuristic domes sometime in the future. It was the perfect society except for one catch: on your thirtieth birthday you had to perform the ritual of Carousel and be renewed in a burst of fire. Nearly everyone in the city believed in renewal except for a few odd thinkers who decided to try and make an escape. Dubbed runners these criminals were hunted down by the city's police force, Sandmen, and terminated. Everything was good until one day the city's computer decided to send a Sandman named Logan-5 (played by Michael York) on a mission to find "Sanctuary", a fabled place where the runners sought to flee to. Pushing ahead Logan's lifeclock (a flashing crystal that showed what age you were depending on its color), Logan and a young woman named Jessica-6 (Jenny Agutter, making a sizeable impact on the psychic landscape of a lot of pre-teen boys) ran away from the city to the deserted outside world, discovering along the way that there could be another way of life that didn't have to end at age 30.
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The script opens at some unspecified time in the future. We're told that technology has been able to make the world a near utopia and as a result the population soars. Without any prior warning a massive supervolcanic event takes place in Yellowstone National Park, destroying the majority of the North American continent and plunging the world underneath a global sheet of ash clouds. There's a chilling image that McQuarrie on just the fourth page as we watch a lone astronaut in orbit above the Earth watching the dark cloud spread across the planet, the image he's witnessing reflected in his helmet's visor. Planet Earth: Lastday.
In the next moment we are introduced to Logan 5, a 20-year-old elite Sandman, the best of the best. Logan and his best friend, fellow Sandman Francis-7 (19 years of age) are taking down runners and the last one they're chasing after is named Doyle-4. They discover to their surprise that Doyle's lifeclock (the crystal on his palm) isn't being picked up by their scans, something that shouldn't be possible. After a harrowing pursuit where the runner and Sandmen use "vators" (like the cars in the '76 movie but they can go anywhere, even straight up), Doyle commits suicide by throwing himself from the vehicle -- and it's here that we discover that Logan and everyone he knows live inside a 20-mile long cylinder. Remember playing Halo for the first time and being able to look "up" and see the ring continuing on up and into the sky? That's kind of what it's like for Logan as he watches Doyle float in weighlessness and then start to increase in velocity as he falls down to the other side of the "world". It should be plainly evident at this stage in the movie that Logan's world isn't anywhere on Earth.
Returning back to Sandman headquarters we're introduced to several other Sandmen. Bear in mind that in the original Logan's Run there were practically four characters -- Logan, Jessica, Francis and an old man -- and then just a bunch of cameos from actors like Farrah Fawcett Majors. In this version of Logan's Run the supporting cast is at least three times as large. One major new character is the 17-year-old called Morah-2, a brash, no-nonsense Sandman who wants to be even better admired than Logan is by his coworkers. We're also introduced to Roth-5 and Del-7, the two Sandmen that watch over the computer displays and essentially serve as radio operators for the Sandmen in the field. This is where I started getting the impression that what I was reading felt like an expanded version of the '76 movie, a "widescreen" version which started showing us more of the world and people that made up Logan's world. The Sandmen all came across well, a bunch of guys ranging from teenagers to one veteran that was on his Lastday that all respected and backed up each other. In the world the average person looks up to the Sandmen with a mixture of awe and fear; people automatically raise their hands to show their crystal when a Sandman approaches. After encountering little details like this, and the increased supporting cast plus the borrowing of ideas from the first movie, I found myself starting to like this new Logan's Run.
We're finally introduced to Jessica-6 around here, a teacher for a classroom of yellow crystal students, who learns of the death of Doyle from a friend of hers. We're also given more explanation as to how this world operates, such as revealing that all women have to give birth to two children so as to maintain the current population (we see one classroom of 14-year-old girls, all of them very pregnant). You don't pick what job you want to do in the colony, instead one is chosen for you by Guardian, the computer that oversees every aspect of life in this self-contained world and that makes announcements to the citizens. We're also shown the new version of Carousel, a giant hourglass building that floats in the zero-G center of the complex's "sky". Every day people can come to Carousel and watch the Lasters -- the ones on their final day -- renew. This process is pretty similar to the first movie version where people cheer on the ones about to "renew". What everyone doesn't get to see is what happens when the Lasters disappear into the darkness; death by dissection as every bit of bone, flesh and blood get recycled back into the colony. It would have made a helluva scene to see.
Since before he was born, there were signs pointing to him having extraordinary abilities, but after suffering his first panic attack in his early teens, he begins to struggle with not only his growing social anxiety, but also how to control his powers; the ability to create and manipulate fire. 2ff7e9595c
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