“SOYLENT GREEN IS—“ ah, you know the rest.
Yep, let’s kick off 2022 with a seventies scifi dystopian classic that’s given way to many a skyward screaming Charlton Heston impression over the years. You may know the meme, you may know the theme of commercialized cannibalism, but how well does Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green actually hold up?
First of all, the context. It’s an adaptation of Harry Harrison’s sixties novel ‘Make Room!’, conceived and written when the sexual revolution was but a murmur and birth control at best on the horizon. Around this period, it wasn’t unreasonable to project that New York City would have a population exceeding Denmark’s by the far flung future of 1996, with the baby boom still very much in recent memory. The novel itself doesn’t hold up that well, being mostly an author tract about overpopulation, with the Soylent itself being…well, genuinely an artificial foodstuff made from soy and lentils. Oh, the horror. I’ll bet there’s already a dozen hipster restaurants in any given major city serving that sort of thing now. Thankfully, Fleischer went for something a little more visceral to make a more attractive hook for the film…
Appropriately enough, the film takes place in 2022, where Manhattan has a population of 40 million, housing has gone to hell, and anything resembling a stable biosphere has become a vague memory. Charlton Heston, fresh from screaming at the Statue of Liberty a few years back, plays a growling NYPD detective who is tasked with investigating the murder of a board member from the Soylent Corporation, with only the rich being able to afford any sort of support from what seems to remain of civil authority. You can see already that, despite the dated figures, despite the seventies Pong-themed decor, things might be hitting closer to home than you may expect. As usual with Heston, his character isn’t exactly a warm and fuzzy fellow, and as also usual with scifi of the era, there’s very little in the way of anything uplifting. Even more on the nose with environmental themes around this time was Silent Running, for instance, and having seen that I chuckle whenever someone says Avatar drove its point too hard.
What does definitely hold up is the atmosphere of the film. This New York of 2022 might not have issues with gentrification and overprice coffee, but what it does have is people sleeping on stairwells for lack of living space, where life is so cheap that the police literally move crowds out of the way by (amusingly slow-moving, granted) bulldozers, where curfews leave oppressive and detritus-strewn city streets deserted, where the upper class live in gated arcologies with their own pools of concubines. To a current viewer, things might seem slow-paced and not the most riveting, but there is a definite sense of horrific realisation to come even with the famous twist in mind. Heston’s struggling against something far bigger than him, and as it turns out, far more desperate.
And as it stands, despite knowing what you’re in for, the twist hits better than you may think. Heston doesn’t scream the line about Soylent Green being people as the impressions do, but it’s a shattered whisper as he’s carted off. It’s not even that the Soylent Corporation is literally feeding us to ourselves out of any cynical profit motive, but because there’s simply no other option. Things have been left so late, it becomes apparent, that you have to wonder what revealing the truth even accomplishes at this point. And that is just the discomforting and perhaps ever so unnervingly pertinent feeling the film succeeds in leaving you on.
Slow it may be watching it now, odd some touches may seem, but Soylent Green can still be worth a curiosity watch. Beyond the seventies-rooted worries of overpopulation, there’s still the themes of ecological collapse that leave even the idea of verdant natural vistas an alien thought to the denizens of future urban blight that leer at you despite the decades since. There’s the images of overstuffed housing that perhaps may be closer to a reality in decades to come. And there is, of course, the notion that with a little more effort, this may have been avoided, before scrambled solutions of feeding the people caramelized bone marrow. It may not have quite been Fleischer’s intent in 1973, but almost fifty years later with his future forecast come and gone, there’s perhaps still a warning left to be heeded…
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