Movie Time: Soylent Green

I hope you had a chance to gather with family and/or friends to indulge in the yearly food fest known as Thanksgiving. I hope your table was blessed with food of sufficient quantity and quality.  

I guess we should be thankful we still have access to real food and not fabricated food substitute wafers made from...

Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

It's.... Movie Time!

This week's cinematic post takes us back to 1973 for a film set in a dystopian future beset by a catastrophic climate, over population, wealth inequity and food shortages.

Was that a move I saw or was I just watching CNN?

Nope, it's a movie from 1973 starring Charlton Heston which combines science fiction elements with a crime procedural.

This is Soylent Green.  

In the future year of 2023, life on Earth sucks!

The compounding effects overpopulation, global warming, and pollution are pushing humanity towards extinction.

The population of the planet is 20 billion.

40 million of them are crammed into New York City.  

It's a hell of a great city to live... if you're rich.

The elite can afford spacious apartments, security, clean water and real food. 

These apartments come with concubines, sex workers who have no citizenship or right and are considered "furniture".

New York City is just plain hell if you're not rich.     

The poor live in whatever squalid corner they can find, use irradiated water from communal spigots, and eat highly processed and often toxic wafers: Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow.

Good news! The latest wafers taste better, have more nutritional value and are less likely to poison you: Soylent Green.

NYPD detective Robert Thorn lives with his aged friend Sol Roth, a brilliant former college professor and police analyst.

Thorn is investigating the murder of the wealthy and influential William R. Simonson, a board member of the Soylent Corporation. Since the rich are supposed to have top of the line security, Thorns suspects this murder was a professional hit, an assassination.  

With the help of Simonson's concubine Shirl, his investigation leads to a priest whom Simonson had visited shortly before his death. Because of the sanctity of the confessional, the visibly exhausted priest can only hint to Thorn at the contents of the confession. 

For his trouble, the priest is also murdered.

Wow! Thorn has a doozy of a case on his hands.

Too bad he's been told to let it go.

Under direction from Governor Henry C. Santini, Thorn's superiors order him to end the investigation. 

Thorn is a classic archetype of movie detectives who will doggedly refuse to let go of a case even when told to do so by those in authority. 

Simonson's murder hints at something big and sinister and Thorn will be damned if he's just going to let it go. 

Driven by a need for order in a world in chaos.

Driven by a need for justice in a world increasingly without care.

Driven by a need to just know the answers in a world with too many questions. 

Roth is helping Thorn with research, reviewing some books that Thorn retrieved from Simonson's apartment: the Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015–2019.

The oceanographic reports that the oceans are dying and can no longer produce the plankton from which Soylent Green is made. Which begs the question: what the hell is Soylent Green made from?

The answer to that question was especially disturbing to Simonson and it appears the Soylent Corporation had him killed to keep him quiet.  

Roth is so bothered by these discoveries that he chooses assisted suicide at a government clinic.  Thorn tries to stop his old friend but he's too late. 

Thorn becomes more determined than ever to find proof of  the Soylent Corporation's crimes against humanity. 

Thorn secretly boards a waste truck transporting human bodies from the euthanasia center to a waste-disposal plant, where he witnesses human corpses being processed into....

Well, you know where this is going, right?

Thorn is discovered by Soylent's guards and he barely gets away. Thorns escapes to a church crowded with the indigent poor while Soylent sends a cadre of assassins in pursuit.  Thorn kills his attackers but is severely wounded.   

As paramedics tend to the injured Thorn, he shouts to the surrounding crowd, "Soylent Green is people!"

Gee, Dave-El, how about a spoiler alert or something. 

Look, Charlton Heston's frantic revelation is ingrained in pop culture and has been referenced, homaged and parodied countless times. The first time I watched Soylent Green, I already knew "Soylent Green is people!" from sheer pop culture osmosis.

Knowing about this film and watching this film are two different things and when I sat down to actually watch Soylent Green  from beginng to end, I was not fully prepared for the visceral power of the world this movie creates.  

Yes, we may have successfully kept this planet alive up to and past the year 2022 but watching Soylent Green, I can't help but fear that the world we live in is precariously balanced and would not take much to tip it over into the dystopian hellscape delivered by this movie.

The United States is under the leadership of a man and a political party that puts corporate greed over the ideals of human compassion and dignity.  This is leadership that sees climate change as a hoax and hinderous to economic and political power.  It seems we are too close from turning Soylent Green from a science fiction movie into a damnable documentary. 

About that movie...

The role of Sol Roth is the final film performance of Edgar G, Robinson. The scene of Roth entering the government run euthanasia center  to end his life was done under the shadow of Robinson's own mortality: the long time actor from the Golden Age of Hollywood was dying of cancer.  

The poignant scene where Thorn says goodbye to Roth was also Charlton Heston saying goodbye to Edgar G. Robinson. Those tears were real.  

Soylent Green is powerful and gut wrenching in it's unflinching look at a world where everything than can do wrong is going wrong and the frustrating request of one man to find some small measure of justice in such a world.

Charlton Heston had a reputation for a being an over the top actor but this inclination serves Heston well in his approach to Thorn, one last man who actually gives an actual fuck in a crazy dying world with no fucks left to give.  

In 1973, Soylent Green  won the Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film.

If nothing else, in the wake of Thanksgiving, Soylent Green makes you thankful that our world isn't quite that bad yet.

And fearful of how close we can be to that kind of world.  

___________________

Coming up on future editions of Movie Time:

tomorrow, a film noir from 1945. 

Next Saturday, Wicked: For Good.

Followed by a 2025 Pixar film and (believe it or not) K-Pop Demon Hunters!