I Finally Watched... LOGAN'S RUN (1976)

Muse from the Orb ^ | May 24, 2026 | Orb_Muse

[Angelino97]

Logan’s Run was the last great sci-fi movie of the the “tinsel/synthesizer” era — camp, fun, brightly-lit movies where production design communicated THE FUTURE with shiny interiors, rainbow colors, boop-zoop sounds, and (in the case of Zardoz and Barbarella) sets that were sometimes literally just tinsel.

In the Hollywood imagination from 1968-1977, it was expected that the third millennium would look like The Cher Show, or that Peter Brook production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream but with even more multicolored robes, wires, and tubes that made cool space sounds.

Logan’s Run is a capstone for this era, a fantastic high note on which the tinsel age would unwittingly end. No movie has done mirrors, neon, or that “extremely shiny airport” type of futurism better — every woman gets her own Sabrina Carpenter wardrobe, and you shuttle from environ to environ in little bubble domes like it’s Epcot.

Farrah Fawcett’s cameo as a medspa beautician is spot-on — her signature smile, flirtatious and innocent but weirdly sinister in its perfection, makes her the perfect symbol for this youth-obsessed world where an entire population’s energy is channeled into consumption and frivolity...

Logan’s Run had the cruel blessing of premiering one year before Star Wars. Cruel because the VFX of Star Wars singlehandedly “aged Logan’s Run a century overnight.” But in obscurer ways a blessing, because the arrival of Star Wars froze Logan’s Run like amber, dooming and preserving it at the same time.

The two represent a sharp divide in aesthetics and sensibilities — mirrors and lights vs. “used future,” middling social commentary vs. distant galaxy adventure, schlock New Age aesthetics (ankhs!) vs. deeper Campbellian mysticism.

Star Wars and Logan’s Run are enshined together as contrasts — one era of sci-fi on its last legs, another just beginning.

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TOPICS: TV/Movies
KEYWORDS: euthanasia; expirationdate; logansrun; movies; scifi; thx1138

[fwdude]

I could see where Gas-s-s-s could be a cult classic. There was a famous drive-in scene as well where a band was playing instead of a movie. “Free love” was also a running theme.

[Charles Martel]

Which begs the question, what and why were they being fed when on the inside? Seems like people had jobs (such as the protagonist being a cop, or Farrah in the parlor), but like America today, so much of it is tertiary and service sector economics. What did they produce?

The movie script is typical of what Hollywood did to science fiction novels and short stories back then. Mangled by writers whose interests lay in other genres, but they needed a paycheck.

Unlike the movie's more limited scope, the novel mentioned a number of domed cities across the world, including a half-destroyed undersea food collection city/AI named Molly. The north pole prison (Hell) is where condemned *human* criminal Box is living and sculpting. Box had been incarcerated by his city's computer/System for torturing a young girl, then was injured while trying to escape. He was rebuilt into a cyborg and exiled to the frozen wastes of "Hell". The movie combines Molly's function with Box's appearance and psychopathic behavior - and definitely hints at previous runners being frozen in place of the "protein from the sea" which had stopped coming (again, better described in the book). Cannibalism stories were trending in the '70s, I guess.

[Beowulf9]

Nobody remembers Penny Marshall was in one, LOL.

https://youtu.be/U16XoHQwZG4

[Nateman]

..I think the Time Machine is the real warning of what could happen with run-a-way technology..

I think Idiocracy is the most accurate prediction of our future.

[Nateman]

White folks ain’t planning for us to be here!” - Richard Pryor

The original Star Trek had no Mozlems. I like that kind of future!

[No name given]

Yep.

[No name given]

Like the 2005 Michael Bay flick “The Island”.

[No name given]

That’s how brainwashed they’ve become.

[so_real]

I tried reading the book ... and gave up. It was not great, was it? I'm genuinely amazed by Goodman's ability to make a screenplay out of it. He definitely saw something in the text that I could not see.

[telescope115]

It’s a favorite of mine. Michael York, Richard Jordan, and Peter Ustinov were good in it. And of COURSE, Jenny Agutter and Farrah Fawcett. It was different.

[JeemBeau]

Or what is imposed on IT workers in the U.S. .

[telescope115]

Look up the movie Walkabout….

[dfwgator]

The original Star Trek had no Mozlems. I like that kind of future!

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What about Khan?

[Poison Pill]

We also don’t have the definitive Logan’s Run because key scenes that make the plot cohere were edited out and then lost.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I saw more of Jenny Agutter in WALKABOUT. “snort!”

[FlatulusMaximus]

Neither Logan’s Run nor Star Wars is worth a second look. Both are completely brainless.

[BiteYourSelf]

Soylent green made from the thirty year olds.😗🤔

[rollo tomasi]

I think 'Logan's Run' should be blasted everywhere, especially Europe/Canada now. If you have certain ailments, there is a marketing campaign to kill yourself because their health care costs are depleting.

Logan's Run is a valid warning against a tyrannical government that's pertinent now believe it or not, however, I agree Star Wars is intellectual slop.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15265161.2023.2265265

[rollo tomasi]

Logan's Run is an allegory pertaining to Plato's Cave allegory/concept.

[Rockingham]

A faithful remake of Logan's Run would struggle to be commercially viable because the design aesthetic and story are so closely bound to the era of the original. In addition, a more recent entry in the escape from Utopia sci-fi genre, The Island, did poorly at the box office.