Logan's Run (1976 film)

Logan's Run is a 1976 science fiction film based on the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. Iit depicts a dystopian future society in which population and the consumption of resources is managed and maintained in equilibrium by the simple expediency of killing everyone who reaches a particular age, thus neatly (and inhumanely) avoiding the issue of overpopulation which was of growing concern at the time. The story follows the actions of Logan, a Deep Sleep Operative or "Sandman", as he "runs" from society's lethal demand.

The 1976 film version directed by Michael Anderson and starring Michael York was shot primarily in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex (including locations such as the Fort Worth Water Gardens and the Dallas Market Center), and is largely faithful to the initial parts of the book, while deviating markedly in its latter half.

Plot introduction

In both the book and the film a person's maximum age is strictly legislated. When people reach the limit known as "Lastday" they are executed in a "Sleepshop". The novel sets this limit at twenty-one years whereas Lastday occurs at the age of thirty in the film. A person's age is revealed by their lifeclock — a crystal embedded in the palm of their left hand that changes colour in a programmed sequence.

Lifeclock System:

Crystal Colour	In Novel	In Film
White	N/A	Birth to 7 years.
Yellow	Birth to 7 years.	7 to 15 years.
Blue:	7 to 14 years.	N/A
Green	N/A	15 to 21 years.
Red:	14 years to Lastday (21 years).	21 years to 10 days before Lastday (30 years).
Blinking Red/Black:	Lastday.	10 days to Lastday.
Black:	End of Lastday (death)	End of Lastday (death)

In Logan's society, all those whose lifeclocks turn black must report for execution on Lastday. "Runners" are people who refuse to report in an attempt to escape this fate. Logan is a "Deep Sleep Operative" or "Sandman", whose job it is to terminate Runners. On his own Lastday he becomes a Runner himself in an attempt to infiltrate an apparent underground railroad for runners seeking "Sanctuary" — a place where they can live freely in defiance of society's dictates.

Jessica 6, a contact Logan made when he terminated her Runner brother, helps him in his quest.

Differences between the novel and film

The film is reasonably faithful to the novel in its first half, with some specific differences. The movie is set in a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the final remnants of humanity live in a domed city sealed off from the outside world. Thus, the population control policy is designed to prevent overpopulation of the dome. In the film, there is a death ceremony called "Carousel" in which people believe they may be "renewed".

In the novel, there has been no worldwide apocalyptic war, but some cities from the past (e.g. Washington D.C.) have been ruined in the Little War. Most cities are massive and thriving, which makes the forced-execution premise much more cynical. Accordingly, in the novel, Logan and Jessica travel all over North America with a brief layover in a research station in the Challenger Deep. The novel does not contain Carousel, nor the concept of life renewal.

In the film it is implied that the age of sexual consent is fifteen, when one's life clock turns green. In the book, however, there is apparently no age of consent after leaving the creche at seven: at one point Logan is approached by a twelve-year-old girl who assures him that she is "skilled beyond all others", and later he meets a "woman" of fifteen who tells him that her last lover was an eleven-year-old boy.

Also in the movie, Logan is assigned by the city's computer to go undercover as a Runner to find Sanctuary and destroy it, and Logan's lifeclock (referred to as "palm flowers" in the novel) is artificially advanced to enable him to infiltrate the network of citizens sympathetic to Runners. In the book, Logan decides to undertake this quest himself on his own Lastday so that he will be remembered as a hero. For most of the book, therefore, Logan is a much darker character, an antihero, with his character developing a growing sympathy towards Runners until he eventually desires to achieve, not destroy, Sanctuary.

In the movie, Logan finds an ankh pendant, which is a key to Sanctuary, on the body of a Runner he has killed. In the novel he finds a card that allows him to contact an underground network of Runners, through which he meets Jessica. Logan's character in the movie is similarly amoral, but also naïve when compared to other Sandmen. His character is more that of an innocent corrupted by the system — and victimized by it as well. When he is assigned the task of finding Sanctuary, his lifeclock is advanced to Lastday although he is "only Red-6" (four years short of the maximum lifespan).

The character of Box, a psychotic robot whom the pair encounters, is much changed in the film. In the novel, Logan and Jessica find themselves trapped in an Arctic prison colony and are told that Box, the colony's most violent and insane inmate, is their only key to escape. In the movie, Box is a malfunctioning food-processing cyborg located in a passage that lies along the Runners' escape route from the domed city. He appears to predate the collapse of outside civilization, and was once assigned to freeze food delivered to the city (as he proclaims, "Sea greens and protein from the sea. Fresh as harvest day!"), but he now freezes Runners because the original food deliveries stopped coming and they started coming instead. This may be an allusion to the 1973 film Soylent Green. In the film, the presence of Box and a gallery of frozen Runners leads Logan to conclude that no Runner has ever really escaped the city and that Sanctuary is therefore a myth.

In the movie, the Sandmen used standard-issue sci-fi blaster pistols. In the novel, Sandmen were assigned a revolver-style gun, limited to six shots. Each gun would only work for a specific Sandman's handprint. Each of the six shots in the gun served a different purpose: homer, nitro, vapor, tangler, ripper, and needler.

Plot conclusion

Francis, Logan's best friend, follows Logan and Jessica in an attempt to save his friend and fulfill his duty as a Sandman by terminating Jessica. After narrowly escaping from Box's cave, Logan and Jessica conclude that all previous Runners were killed by Box and that Sanctuary does not exist. In the ruins of Washington D.C., they meet an old man (Peter Ustinov) who is well beyond the thirty-year lifespan that citizens are allowed. In a confrontation between Logan and Francis, they learn that the restrictions on population, Carousel, and the basis for their society are no longer necessary. Francis dies in the fight.

Logan, Jessica and the old man decide to return to the domed city to tell the inhabitants the truth. Logan and Jessica enter the city, are arrested, and are brought to the city computer for interrogation. Logan tells the computer about his findings — there is no Sanctuary, nothing but ruins and an old man outside the city, and all the Runners were frozen by Box. This information runs contrary to what the computer holds as established fact, leading it to say several variations on the classic phrase "does not compute" and explode in a fit of cognitive dissonance, which in turn causes a chain reaction of explosions and electrical discharges throughout the city, blasting the dome open to the outside world. Logan and Jessica (and eventually the entire city populace) escape, and the under-thirty citizens meet the old man who accompanied them. The human race is thus freed from totalitarian control. The film's ending is much more sentimental than that of the book.

Other adaptations

TV

A television series spun off from the film, starring Gregory Harrison as Logan 5 and Heather Menzies as Jessica 6, lasted one season of 14 episodes in the late 1970s, from September 16, 1977 through January 7, 1978 on U.S. television (CBS-TV). D.C. Fontana served as story editor, and employed several other writers from Star Trek as well as the original novel's authors.

To save money, the series depicted Logan and Jessica — still pursued by Francis Randolph Powell — on a cross-country trek to Sanctuary in a post-apocalyptic America. The domed city was seen only in the pilot and two other episodes, using recycled footage from the film. In a change from the book and film, the television series had the city run by a cabal of elderly citizens. Logan and Jessica were joined by an android, "REM", played for comic relief by Donald Moffat. Most of the plots were conventional genre clichés, including one "Logan-has-amnesia" episode.

2007 film

There is a film remake in the works scheduled to be released in late 2007. James McTeigue is set to co-write and direct the film.^*

Others

Emperor Norton Records published Logan's Sanctuary, the soundtrack to an imaginary Logan's Run sequel, written and performed by Roger Manning Jr. and Brian Reitzell.
An Alternative Reality Game (ARG) was created by the web development group at VirtuQuest.com. The game, entitled "of Domes" was a recreation of the Logan's Run city 31 years after Logan5. This game is archived and playable in the gallery at Virtuquest.com

Allusions/references from other works

The visual set of the domed city appears in an early fourth-season episode of Mork and Mindy to represent the planet Ork. It also appears briefly in the 1984 film The Ice Pirates.

Family Guy makes a reference to this movie in the episode "Brian in Love".

The Simpsons makes a reference to the glowing crystals in episode BABF16 entitled "Kill the Alligator and Run", when the MTV-like "V-jay" turns 25 years old.

South Park makes a reference to the Carousel ceremony in the episode "The Wacky Molestation Adventure", which is how Kenny dies in that episode.

Robot Chicken makes a reference to the glowing crystals in the episode 1x20 "The Black Cherry".

Friends makes a reference to Logan's Run in the episode "The One with Ross and Monica's Cousin" (episode # 7.19), when Ross calls it the sexiest movie ever.

Spaced makes a reference to Lastday in episode 2.6.

Tim: You'd be dead in 4 years' time, if this was Logan's Run.

Daisy: That'd be terrible.

Tim: I know. I'd look like a twat in a jumpsuit.

Daisy: Don't say that, Tim. That is a word which hates women.

Tim: What, twat?

Daisy: No, jumpsuit.

Gilmore Girls (6th season, episode 8) makes a reference to Logan's Run when the character Logan Huntzberger bolts away from his friends; one of them shouts, "We've got a Runner!" ^*

In the movie Free Enterprise, a mid-life crisis is exposed when a character dreams he is on Lastday and his best friend is a Sandman. The central characters in this movie also appear to accept the term Lastday as a standard reference for ones 30th birthday.

In Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, the radio announcer for Radio-X makes references to Logan's Run multiple times most notably when describing how much improved life would be should all people over 21 be killed.

The Island (2005 film), though never actually addresses Logan's Run by name, is very similar in many respects to the overall plot.

Style

Both book and film detail the future society as permissive, and include orgies and the accepted use of drugs. Tobacco, however, is a banned substance, and police are known to raid places where cigarettes are smoked.

The architectural motif of the "city of the future" depicted in the film is a source of amusement to present-day viewers due to its strong resemblance to a mid-1970's indoor shopping center, where much of the location shooting for the film took place.

The film is notable for being one of the first major motion pictures to feature holograms (with the exception of THX 1138), namely an image of Michael York speaking which was created for an interrogation sequence in the film.

Trivia

After the film's premiere on May 7, 1976 in San Diego, California, the studio edited the film for length and to enable it to acquire a PG rating from the MPAA.^*

The special effect guns carried by the Sandmen were created by John Cramer. The flame was made by shooting acetylene gas against a model-airplane glow plug, which was located at the front end of the "flash distributor" The blade ("balance plate") under the muzzle cage provided some protection for the glow plug against impact, and added weight to counterbalance the brass tank at the other end of the pistol. This tank held a carbide-water mixture, which generated the acetylene. A lead-acid battery (in the pistol stock) provided power to the glow plug. The guns were failure-prone due to the small size of the tank and the battery, which only provided enough gas and current for a few brief shots before needing to be recharged. Also, due to handling, carbide semisolids occasionally plugged the tubing, or got into the trigger valve and permitted slow leaks, reducing the gas pressure. 16 guns were made, and most were modified for the television series by moving the glow-plug switch to the back of the frame, in the position of a grip safety such as that found on the M1911 pistol. This was for convenience and to prevent accidents such as one which reportedly burned Richard Jordan, which resulted from the glow-plug being hot when he was drawing the pistol from its belt clip.

External links

(1976)
(2007)
The World of Logan's Run The World of Logan's Run
City of Domes Alternative Reality Game by virtuquest.com

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