Heather Menzies and Gregory Harrison, the stars of LOGAN’S RUN the television series. LOGAN’S RUN:
THE COMPLETE SERIES 1977, Warner,
$39.98, approx. 711m, DVD (3 discs) By Michael Barrett
“You and Logan are such pretty people.”
In the 1976 film LOGAN’S
RUN, based on a 1967 novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Logan (Michael York) is a Sandman. He puts people to sleep—or, rather, ter- minates them. The Sandmen are the police of the City of Domes, a glistening techno-paradise where everyone lives in carefree hedonism—until they turn 30, at which point they are “re- newed” in an ecstatic spectacle called Carousel. Before cheering
50
crowds, the lucky participants float and get zapped.
Only a few malcontents sus- pect that Renewal is a myth. The state religion of reincarna- tion is used for social control as people are killed off to make room for the next generation. People are born, live and die but, in a sense, they never leave the womb.
Logan becomes one of these heretical, traitorous doubters and, together with another lovely rebel named Jessica (Jenny Agutter), he goes through a se- ries of adventures on a quest to get outside the dome. They’ve been told the world outside is poisoned, but that’s another lie. Logan and Jessica emerge in the vine-covered ruins of the Capitol building in Washington DC,
whose only inhabitant looks like an ancient, doddering Zeus (Pe- ter Ustinov) with his thousand cats. So much for the old bosses; now a new generation must work out its own system.
As a kid, I enjoyed the film. It presented its story simply, with strange visuals and disturbing ideas. It received an Oscar for effects and was quite a popular movie. Then something hap- pened called STAR WARS, and poor LOGAN’S RUN has suffered in comparison ever since, so that you’ll typically hear it cited as a “silly” counter-example to a “good” movie like STAR WARS. This has become a critical cliché that doesn’t make much sense, not least because STAR WARS is hardly an example of cerebral and sophisticated
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