Soylent Green (1973) - film review

It is 2022.  Civilisation is falling apart and an over-crowded world faces imminent starvation.  The Soylent Corporation offers hope, but it is struggling to keep up with the demand for its processed food tablets, the only source of nutrition available to most of the world’s population.  The most sought-after of these tablets is Soylent Green, which, according to the company’s advertising, is manufactured from high-energy plankton.  Thorn is one of the privileged minority who still has a job.  He works as a cop in New York City, whose population now exceeds forty million.  Thorn is not rich, but he at least has a room, which he shares with an old academic, Sol Roth.  Most people sleep on the streets, in stairwells or in crowded dormitories. 

When he isn’t on riot control, Thorn goes through the motions of playing the detective, although, since corruption is so rife, his efforts rarely amount to anything.  His latest case, the murder of a wealthy businessman named Simonson, intrigues him.  Convinced that Simonson was assassinated, Thorn enlists the aid of his friend Sol and the dead man’s woman, Shirl, to try to resolve the mystery.  It transpires that Simonson was on the board of directors of Soylent and that shortly before he died he was showing signs of mental distress. 

Thorn’s case ties in with Sol’s own researches into Soylent’s mysterious operations.  When the old man uncovers Soylent’s terrible secret, he is devastated.  He checks into a voluntary euthanasia centre and accepts death with equanimity.  Thorn arrives too late to save his friend and watches in horror as his body is bundled into a disposal truck, along with hundreds of others.  Climbing aboard one of these trucks, Thorn accompanies the dead bodies to their final destination - one of Soylent’s processing plants.  The horrific truth suddenly dawns on Thorn...

It’s a sobering thought that when Soylent Green was first seen in 1973 virtually no one had ever heard of the greenhouse effect.  Not many people seemed to be that bothered by the population timebomb either, nor by the depletion of the world’s resources and the irreversible damage to the eco-system caused by relentless industrialisation.  Apart from a few sandal-wearing hippies and the usual prophets of doom, mankind went on pretty well as though the world and its resources were infinite.  Only a few academics with an understanding of epidemiology knew the truth, that the party would have to end one day.   Forty years on, it now looks as if we have all but arrived at this fateful day.  Soylent Green can no longer be considered science-fiction; it has become a statement of the inevitable.

The collapse of any population after a period of unchecked expansion is a basic characteristic of nature and, applied to humanity, it provided the central theme for Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, on which Soylent Green is based.  The film adds another, even more chilling notion, namely that human beings will ultimately be forced to resort to cannibalism as all other species are driven to extinction.  Today, this gruesome dystopian vision of the future feels horribly near to hand, and the question is no longer "Is this going to happen?" but rather "How long do we have left?"  Much of the anguish the viewer experiences when watching this film today comes from a recognition that we have failed to prevent this nightmare from happening. Indeed some of us many well see it in our lifetime.  The expression "You are what you eat" could one day have a very ironic twist to it. 

Soylent Green takes a serious issue (and what could be more serious than the survival of our species?) and treats it with the seriousness it deserves.   With two sci-fi classics (20000 Leagues Under the Sea and Fantastic Voyage) already under his belt, director Richard Fleischer completes the hat-trick and, with this dark cautionary tale, delivers one of the most compelling and thought-provoking films of his career.  Fleischer deserves credit for taking a scenario which must have seemed ludicrously far-fetched in the early 1970s and making it frighteningly real.  Although the film does teeter on the edge of black comedy in a few places, it rarely overplays its hand, but instead shows us a future for the human race that is both plausible and terrifying.

This film marks the final screen appearance of one of Hollywood’s greatest acting talents, Edward G. Robinson.  In his 101st film role, Robinson brings a heart-wrenching humanity to his portrayal, providing a striking and very necessary counterpoint to the stark inhumanity of the world in which his character lives.  The sequence in which Sol Roth goes off to meet his maker could have been grotesquely sentimental, but Robinson (with some commendable support from his co-star Charlton Heston) renders it exquisitely poignant.  The fact that the actor died from cancer two weeks after completing work on this film lends even greater emotional weight to his last scene.   

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this film is its depiction of mankind’s complete moral disintegration, to the extent that human life has become a cheap commodity, totally robbed of all its value.  This is best illustrated in the film’s most notious sequence, the one in which rioters are scooped up by bulldozers and dumped as if they were mounds of trash.  This vision of Hell remains one of the most powerful and disturbing images  of any film.  Is it any wonder that with the passage of time Soylent Green appears increasingly grim and depressing?  Forty years ago, when the film first saw the light of day, we may have had a chance to avoid the possible reality it confronts us with, by changing our behaviour.  Now it is almost certainly too late...

© Chris Alderton 2010

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