Soylent Green (1973)

Director: Richard Fleischer

Starring: Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young

A nightmarish futuristic fantasy about the controlling power of big corporations and an innocent cop who stumbles on the truth.

I’m probably going to be unpopular by saying this, but I did not enjoy ‘Soylent Green’ one bit. With the film revolving mainly around food, there was nothing here I found interesting. On the contrary, I found the film boring.

It is the year 2022 and New York has a population of 40 million, of which around 20 million are unemployed. Poverty and food shortage is at the order of the day, and food companies provide consumers with red and yellow Soylent wafers. Soylent Green is then introduced – a miracle food made from plankton – or so they say…

Charlton Heston stars as Detective Thorn, who investigates the apparent assassination of wealthy businessman William Simonson of the Soylent Corporation. Thorn steals food from the rich, and takes it home for him and his friend, Sol (Edward G. Robinson) to enjoy. Sol remembers a time when he was able to eat well, but Thorn has been born into this new world and is not accustomed to ‘luxury’ foods.

I honestly didn’t understand half of what was going on here, and in fact didn’t really care. The premise was uninteresting and I cared very little for the characters – even Thorn, whose actions were questionable at times.

For a film set in the future (as it were at the time the film was made) it’s not very imaginative. Looking back at 2022, the world was far more advanced than depicted in the film, but I suppose over-population and poverty justifies this (in the film).

‘Soylent Green’ is indeed a very strange movie. And I’m about to do spoilers, so stop reading if you still intend watching it. As it turns out, the soylent green wafers are not made from plankton, but instead it is made from humans. (In the movie, the dead are taken away in garbage trucks to a disposal site. However, this supposed disposal site is actually the Soylent Corporation, and they make soylent green from the dead!). The film’s final moments see Thorn discovering the truth and trying to warn everyone, and these were the only few minutes containing some sort of action – or anything interesting happening… Yawn.

Ugh, enough already. This is so not my kind of movie, and one I’m hoping to forget soon.

Would I watch it again? Definitely not.