Welcome to the Pleasure Dome… by Andrew Darlington Part Two

‘HAIL, FELLOW-PEEPERS…’

Inevitably there was a new tie-in edition of the novel timed to coincide with the movie, although the two formats are distinctively different. In fairness, to place such fictional conjectures on screen presents obvious problems. But ‘Logan’s Run’ still has a lot to recommend it. There was a working screenplay by Nolan himself, but in the transition through pre-production hell it was superceded by an adaptation by David Zelag Goodman. Filming commenced with locations including the clean antiseptic shopping malls of the Dallas and Fort Worth Metroplex – including the Market Center, the Water Gardens and the World Trade Mart. In keeping with such settings there’s no irony or darkness. It is bright and clean, with even the squalor and ruins deliberately contrived. As John Clute’s ‘Science Fiction: An Illustrated Encyclopedia’ (Dorling Kindersley, 1995) points out ‘a couple of years later, this sanitised future was no longer viable, cinema had learned about grit and gunge. But in 1975, clean-cut kids in fab togas could still revolt against saniseal elders and escape outdoors’. For Logan, although there are problems, they are resolved. Such up optimism does not sit well with more downbeat current critical taste. It is very much of its time. But it’s fun.

Welcome to the Pleasure Dome… by Andrew Darlington Part One

‘KEEP ON RUNNING…’

The late-sixties were plagued with persistent rumours that the Rolling Stones were about to embark on a film of Dave Wells’ novel ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ (Pan Books, 1964), in which stale oldsters die off leaving the fractured planet as the exclusive domain of rebellious youth. Although the novel remains unfilmed, ‘sometime in the twenty-third century…’ there was another world cleansed of thirty-somethings, done by other hands. A parallel fictional continuum ignited as a novel, extended into celluloid, then done as a spin-off TV-series, a comic-strip… and follow-up novels. It was ‘Logan’s Run’, and – in those various interlocking media, Logan just keeps on running. Yet the novel does not always coincide with the film. And when the film does coincide with the novel, it’s only in the sketchiest outline way. The novel says that over-population pressures hit critical mass in the year 2000, with intergenerational warfare. And by 2072, all the world was young, by the simple expedient of institutionalised euthanasia at the age of twenty-one, enforced by sanctioned killers. The film reduces that global situation down to a single domed city, and raises the cut-off point to age thirty.