Subject: RETROSPECTIVE: SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

From: [email-masked] (Shane R. Burridge)
Date: 23 May 1996 15:36:39 GMT

SOYLENT GREEN
                       A film review by Shane R. Burridge
                        Copyright 1996 Shane R. Burridge

(1973) 97m. 

In THE OMEGA MAN, Charlton Heston played the last human on Earth,
wandering an empty city alone.  Two years later he'd have exactly the
opposite problem - fighting for room in a city of 40 million.  The
year is 2022, and Heston is Detective Thorn, a New York cop
investigating the murder of a director of the Soylent Corporation, a
powerful food processing company responsible for the manufacture of
vegetable concentrate biscuits.  Thorn is impressed by the wealth of
the victim (in this future, "rich" means being able to afford running
water and strawberries), which enables comforts that he and his
roommate Sol (Edward G. Robinson) can only dream of.

In such an overpopulated world, it's only to be expected that life is
cheap.  People crowd like refugees, living from hand to mouth;
attractive young women are rented out with apartments and referred to
as `furniture'.  Whole film is downbeat; the future is not only
crowded but also polluted (everything outdoors is filmed through a
green haze), economically repressed, nearly bereft of all natural
resources, and suffering from the Greenhouse effect.  Director Richard
Fleischer doesn't show us huge mob scenes (apart from one riot
sequence) or grand views of an out-of-control, decaying megalopolis,
but instead gives us the sense of such a future by focusing on
elements of daily life that have irrevocably changed as a consequence.
 Robinson's Sol, who is pointedly the `soul' of the film, is our
emotional and philosophical connection to the unspoiled past - his
memories are supposed to be ours - and provides the film's only
touching moments.  It's a rare film that makes death (by euthanasia) a
pleasant and more preferable alternative than living, but in SOYLENT
GREEN humanity has reached a dead end: it posits that at a certain
level, there are no solutions.  In fact, the revelation at the film's
end (which you'll probably guess beforehand), if reappraised, may not
be the act of evil and exploitation you'll first think, but the only
viable plan left for survival - it will make you wonder about the
lengths humanity will go to in order to remain on the planet, and
whether it is even necessary if the more noble of human
qualities are to be forfeited as a result.

Film works when it operates at a shabby, grass-roots level (it was a
mistake to try to pass off a 1970's video game as 21st century
technology!) and makes the interesting, if depressing, point that
squalor never dates.  Harry Harrison wrote the source novel, MAKE
ROOM! MAKE ROOM!, and was critical of film's production.  Robinson
died soon after it was released (adding poignancy to his death scene).
 At least he left us with a solid, resonant performance.  Also
starring: Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, and Joseph Cotten.