19: Silent Running (1971)

19: Silent Running (1971) - Destruction of the Valley Forge.
In 2001 FX-meister Douglas Trumbull's 1971 cult sci-fi outing, Bruce Dern plays a renegade astronaut who's killed all his colleagues in order to save Earth's last forest (which for some unexplainable reason the Earth's governments have sent into space for safe-keeping). Dern fakes the destruction of his ship, the Valley Forge, in the hope that Earth will leave him in peace to tend the forest with his robot crew. When the authorities catch up with him, Dern decides to eject the final forest into space with a robot gardener and blow himself up along with the Valley Forge.

Impact: Though not in evidence in the clip, it's Dern's struggle between his better and worse nature that carries the film, and the destruction of the Forge is in part some kind of self-punishment for Dern having murdered his crew-mates, even in a good cause. The explosion is atonement rather than martyrdom, but it's moving for all that; by this point we have developed some sympathy for the misanthropic Dern in the scenes where he re-found his humanity in the company of some of Hollywood's most engaging robots.

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