Logan’s Run starts out pretty well - it’s visually eye-popping, with a miniature city that actually looks active in the establishing shots (in large part from the moving elevated trains). It works well close-up, too; what we see of the city looks like the center of a large shopping mall or a luxury hotel lobby, though not so much that the audience is completely aware of it. We get a feeling of what this world is like, the state of innocence and grace that its inhabitants live in, even as we’re shown that they don’t have the same values as the audience. The “carousel” sequence is remarkable, both for how it is staged and how it shows us how completely right dying at 30 seems for the people in this world.
And then the story starts and things go straight to heck. The powers that be give Logan information that might affect his loyalty just as he’s starting an undercover assignment, and one would really think they’d give instructions for Francis to make it look good rather than have him go off like a loose cannon and jeopardize that. The first encounter with the outside world is even more mind-bogglingly stupid, though after that it simply becomes tiresome. It turns out that all the film’s clever ideas were back in the city, and what’s left is simply having the characters come across as morons as they re-learn about the family unit and other twentieth-century ideas. The finale is also pretty ludicrous - sure, it’s a tradition that things will fail catastrophically at the least provocation, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.