Why I’ll Never Look at Logan’s Run the Same Way Again

And neither will you.

The other night I fast-forwarded through Logan’s Run on Amazon Prime. I’ve always enjoyed the film’s futuristic production design, not to mention sexy Jenny Agutter in her skimpy costumes, or the lack thereof. The film now has the added bonus of looking charmingly mid-‘70s retro, or “Zeerust,” at the folks at TV Tropes.org call this phenomenon. (They also have a page specifically devoted to Logan’s Run itself.)

But when watching most recently, I noticed a detail in the scene in which Agutter’s character makes her debut, the ramifications of which I had never paid attention to before:

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First the guy whom Logan rejects, and then Agutter’s Jessica 6 character beam into Logan’s apartment. Which means that the domed city has a teleportation system, ala Star Trek’s transporter device. And presumably, it’s built into everyone’s apartment inside the film’s domed city. And given what it’s being used for (so that before calling it a night, Logan can unholster his blaster, IYKWIMAITYD), it’s so safe, readily accessible and easy to use, it’s the equivalent of today’s hot chat party lines, which are advertised on late-night TV reruns.

So if all of that is true, why on earth do they need the little domed two-person cars that shoot between the buildings through Plexiglas tubes, sort of like the monorail going through the Disneyworld hotel crossed with a bank’s pneumatic drive-through cylinder?

They. Have. Perfected. Teleportation.

And Logan is the equivalent of a policeman in this dystopian city. If anybody would have access to teleportation, it would be the Sandmen, the easier to track down terminate runners and other futuristic miscreants. And in the movie, the Sandmen ride the tubes whenever they have to catch a fleeing runner, just like everybody else in the city.

Sheesh. I’m sorry, but it’s Hollywood not thinking through the implications of telltale details like this, which completely wrecks an otherwise entirely believable film such as Logan’s Run…

Well, that and the fact that for a movie in which everybody is supposed to die at age 30 (in the book it was 21), the entire cast looks like they’re somewhere between 35 and 40. I’m surprised Martin Short as aging former child star Rusty Van Reddick didn’t have a cameo in the middle of the film. They could have beamed him in!

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