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Logan's Run

jennyagutter.jpgLogan's Run is not about Jenny Agutter naked, although it helps, but about how easy it is for the Empire to subdue its citizens, and the responsibility inherent to them to subvert an comfortable and artificial, yet unstable, state of affairs.
Oh, I am sorry - Am I reading too much into this movie?
The plot posits a seemingly perfect city, perfectly isolated from the real world, where everybody is affluent and have all their desires satisfied, either by the very generous intelligence governing the city, or by the equally hedonistic citizens: since everybody lives only until they 30, all you are left with are young men and braless miniskirted young women. Perfect! The world as a frat party! You have to destroy that, though.

Trouble begins easily as soon as Logan starts to think - and soon we get it: thinking is dangerous! Thinking leads to growing up, and being responsible for yourself, and no more free sex.
These people remind me so much of current society in affluent countries: you can see life only while young and carefree, but as soon as you hit some vaguely accepted age for adulthood, your problems begin: not only are you expelled from the garden of Eden, meaning no more sex and soma, but soon thereafter you have to start to care about all those things that happened to other people: disease, death and births. You start working for society, instead of the other way around.
And well, you see, of those seeking Sanctuary, escaping the strict rules of the city, not one makes it alive - the whole Sanctuary theme becomes a belief for all of those that feel somehow disenfranchised by the City, but its real value is null. It is only an ideal, and as such a poor clear escapism from what life is – but not what it offers.

The whole idea of frozen bodies in the roof makes sense - otherwise you would expect a whole resistance movement coming from those that have successfully defied the City and its facile trappings, some underground railroad with support from outside, a more rapidly deteriorating City.

Or perhaps the City knew it all along, some sort of Singularity City, aware, perfect, computationally intense and distributed, and realized that it itself was destroying life, curiosity, adventure, and decided to kill itself – by recruiting some unsuspecting citizens, and making them risk their lives.

Pretty idea, no? Rather unsubstantiated, but hey, I will take anything.

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