My movie watch on 6 July 2022 was nothing if not timely, a classic science fiction film from the early 1970s but which is set in the future, in the year 2022, to be precise. How happy I am that its severely dystopian vision of 2022 is very different from present-day reality. For the movie in question was Soylent Green.
Directed by Richard Fleischer, with a Stanley R. Greenberg screenplay based upon sci fi author Harry Harrison's 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! and released by MGM in 1973, Soylent Green is set in a USA (predominantly NYC) where human over-population, pollution, the greenhouse effect, and heedless, needless plundering of natural resources have combined hideously and heinously to turn our once-lush, beautiful planet into an overcrowded hell-hole.
Here only the rich and powerful inhabit plush, luxurious, heavily-guarded homes, with everyone else consigned to poverty and near-starvation in the slums. There, nothing works properly (if at all), voluntary euthanasia is actively encouraged, and food, such that it is, consists of tasteless rationed slabs of processed protein of different colours, created by the all-powerful Soylent Corporation. The most sought-after version, as it tastes better than the rest, is Soylent Green, manufactured from the inexorably diminishing quantities of plankton that still survive in the oceans.
One night, a leading Soylent Corporation board member is brutally murdered in his elite NYC penthouse, and a policeman named Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is assigned to the case, seeking the murderer. Thorn is unofficially assisted by his friend and cohabiter Sol Roth (an unrecognisable Edward G. Robinson in his final movie), who is a brilliant elderly ex-professor. What they discover, however, goes far beyond a murder, exposing the true, horrifying nature of Soylent Green.
It turns out that in reality the plankton needed to produce this food stuff had been entirely consumed some years ago, so Soylent Corporation had secretly turned to a very different source for it – let's just say that recycling is taken to a chilling new level inside the factory walls of this company, one that has a very close working relationship with the nearby euthanasia clinics...
In a particularly tragic, poignant coincidence if true (there is some controversy regarding this), the same evening after filming his final scene for Soylent Green, the scene in which his character Sol undergoes voluntary euthanasia, Edward G. Robinson passed away (an alternative claim is that he passed away 10 days after shooting ended). In any event, knowing that Robinson was terminally ill with bladder cancer, director Fleischer had filmed all of his scenes before any others. Moreover, the tears that Heston as Thorn wept at Sol's death were real, because he knew that Robinson was so ill he would never act again, that this scene was his finale on film.
Soylent Green is a fascinating albeit deeply disturbing movie, offering a truly terrifying glimpse into a grim future bedeviled by pressing issues relating to climate change, overcrowding, environmental destruction, and poverty – not so different after all from the real 2022 that we're living in right now, come to think of it!
If you'd like to pay a mercifully brief visit to this nightmarish alternate 2022, be sure to click here and here to view a couple of stark, official Soylent Green trailers on YouTube.
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
Forgot that "Soylent Green" was literally set in 2022. Very long time ago I have seen it, so I can't remember that much. I do know that Harry Harrison, author of the book the film was based on, was quite dissatisfied with the final result.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite movies. I hope we never reach this point in our existence.
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