Revealing mistake: Freeman Lowell has several cargo containers dumped off the spaceship, to make it appear the ship has suffered an accident. A wide shot shows the ship receding in the distance, with the containers rolling weightlessly in the foreground. As the foreground containers pass slightly in front of the more distant ones, they don't mask them; their images overlap. The containers were apparently composited into the shot with simple multiple exposures. (00:35:40)
Silent Running (1972)
1 revealing mistake
Directed by: Douglas Trumbull
Starring: Bruce Dern, Ron Rifkin, Jesse Vint, Cliff Potts
Character mistake: While he may not have figured it out the moment he found the forest dying, certainly a botanist like Freeman Lowell would know plants need light to survive.
Freeman Lowell: It calls back a time when there were flowers all over the Earth... and there were valleys. And there were plains of tall green grass that you could lie down in - you could go to sleep in. And there were blue skies, and there was fresh air... and there were things growing all over the place, not just in some domed enclosures blasted some millions of miles out in to space.
Trivia: The interior shots of the American Airlines Space Freighter "Valley Forge" were actually filmed aboard the Korean-War-era aircraft carrier "USS Valley Forge" (LPH-8) at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in California. After filming was completed, the decommissioned aircraft carrier "Valley Forge" was scrapped.
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