10 Films That Wanted To Be Star Trek
3. Silent Running
Silent Running is a 1972 film directed by Douglas Trumbull, who would go on to create the effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The film depicts Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell, an astronaut, and botanist who serves aboard the Valley Forge. It is a bio-dome, orbiting Saturn, tasked with keeping various plants and fauna alive, to later be returned to an Earth that is currently unable to manage them.
The film's theme of conservationism is pure Trek, with Lowell rebelling against his human superiors to protect the plant life aboard his ship. He befriends three drones - Huey, Louie, Dewey, who help him care for the greenery, though Louie is lost along the way. While there is a logical issue with the movie - how did everyone forget that plants need sunlight to survive? - it is still a surprisingly forward-thinking environmentalist film for the time.
The Valley Forge's mission would be borrowed by Star Trek: Discovery, this time portrayed by the USS Tikov. While the Valley Forge itself takes its name from the aircraft carrier, there is also an Excelsior-class ship serving with that name during the Battle of Chin'toka in Deep Space Nine.
The film may owe more to 2001 than it does to Star Trek, but it still deals with the theme of humanities own short-sightedness, a theme that had already been, and would again be, visited in Star Trek, many, many times.