| Soylent Green | |
|---|---|
theatrical release poster by John Solie |
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| Directed by | Richard Fleischer |
| Produced by | Walter Seltzer Russell Thacher |
| Screenplay by | Stanley R. Greenberg |
| Based on | Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison |
| Starring | Charlton Heston Leigh Taylor-Young Edward G. Robinson |
| Music by | Fred Myrow |
| Cinematography | Richard H. Kline |
| Editing by | Samuel E. Beetley |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Release date(s) | April 19, 1973 |
| Running time | 97 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Soylent Green is a 1973 American science fiction film directed by Richard Fleischer. Starring Charlton Heston, the film overlays the police procedural and science fiction genres as it depicts the investigation into the murder of a wealthy businessman in a dystopian future suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans, and a hot climate due to the greenhouse effect. Much of the population survives on processed food rations, including "soylent green".
The film, which is loosely based upon the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison, won the Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film in 1973.
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In 2022, the population has grown to forty million people in New York City alone. Housing is dilapidated and overcrowded; homeless people fill the streets and line fire escapes and stairways. Food is scarce; most of the population survives on rations produced by the Soylent Corporation, whose newest product is Soylent Green, a small green wafer advertised to contain "high-energy plankton". It is more nutritious and palatable than the other varieties but is in short supply, which leads to food riots. Protagonist Robert Thorn is a New York City Police Department detective living with his aged friend Solomon "Sol" Roth, a former scholar who searches the remnants of written records to help Thorn's investigations.
Thorn investigates the murder of William R. Simonson, a director of the Soylent Corporation while helping himself to the latter's food, liquor, bathroom, and books. He questions Shirl, an attractive concubine (referred to as "furniture"), and Simonson's bodyguard, Tab Fielding, who claims to have escorted Shirl shopping when the attack took place.
Returning to his apartment, Thorn gives Roth the Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015 to 2019 taken from Simonson's apartment; then tells his Lieutenant (Hatcher) that he suspects an assassination on grounds that nothing was stolen from the apartment and the murder seemed professional, whereas the apartment's sophisticated alarm and monitoring electronics failed to detect the murder and Fielding failed to prevent it.
After questioning Fielding's mistress, Martha, Thorn returns to his apartment. When he presents Roth with strawberry jam taken from Fielding's apartment, Roth declares it too great a luxury for the concubine of a bodyguard. Thorn returns to question Shirl again; whereupon she tells him that Simonson became troubled in the days before his death. Thorn questions a priest whom Simonson had visited but the priest at first fails to remember Simonson and is later unable to describe the latter's confession. Fielding later murders the priest, suspecting him of telling Thorn Simonson's confession to silence him. When Thorn begins discovering why Simonson was murdered, New York State's Governor Joseph Santini, once Simonson's partner in a high-profile law firm, orders the investigation closed; but Thorn disobeys. When Thorn is on riot duty at the distribution of rations, Simonson's murderer is dispatched by the Soylent Corporation to kill him but is crushed by a riot-control vehicle.
Roth examines Soylent's oceanographic reports; he and his fellows discover that the oceans no longer produce the plankton from which Soylent Green is said to be made and that it is now made of the human dead. Unable to live with this discovery, Roth seeks assisted suicide at a government clinic in Madison Square Garden. There, Roth tells Thorn the secret of Soylent Green and begs him to follow his body to the processing center and report to the other scholars.
Thorn does so and sees human corpses converted into Soylent Green. Returning to make his report, he is ambushed by Fielding and retreats into a cathedral filled with homeless people, where he kills Fielding.
When police arrive, Thorn urges Hatcher to spread the word that "Soylent Green is PEOPLE!"
The screenplay was based on the 1966 Harrison novel Make Room! Make Room!, which is set in the year 1999 with the theme of overpopulation and overuse of resources leading to increasing poverty, food shortages, and social disorder. Harrison was contractually forbidden control over the screenplay and kept from knowing during negotiations that it was MGM buying the film rights;[1] He discussed the adaptation in Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies (1984, ISBN 0385192029; edited by Danny Peary),[1] noting that the "murder and chase sequences [and] the 'furniture' girls are not what the film is about — and are completely irrelevant" and answered his own rhetorical question "Am I pleased with the film? I would say fifty percent".[1]
While the book refers to "soylent steaks", it makes no reference to "Soylent Green", the processed food rations depicted in the film. The book's title was not used for the movie on grounds that it might have confused audiences into thinking it a big-screen version of Make Room for Daddy.[2]
This was the 101st and last movie in which Edward G. Robinson appeared, having died of cancer twelve days after the filming, on January 26, 1973. Heston was the only member of the crew that Robinson told of his cancer (immediately before filming the scene of Robinson's character's death), knowing that this knowledge would deeply affect Heston, and therefore his playing of the scene.[3][4] Robinson had previously worked with Heston in The Ten Commandments (1956) and the make-up tests for Planet of the Apes.
Time called it "intermittently interesting"; they note that "Heston forsak[es] his granite stoicism for once" and assert the film "will be most remembered for the last appearance of Edward G. Robinson...In a rueful irony, his death scene, in which he is hygienically dispatched with the help of piped-in light classical music and movies of rich fields flashed before him on a towering screen, is the best in the film."[5] New York Times critic A.H. Weiler wrote "Soylent Green projects essentially simple, muscular melodrama a good deal more effectively than it does the potential of man's seemingly witless destruction of the earth's resources"; Weiler concludes "Richard Fleischer's direction stresses action, not nuances of meaning or characterization. Mr. Robinson is pitiably natural as the realistic, sensitive oldster facing the futility of living in dying surroundings. But Mr. Heston is simply a rough cop chasing standard bad guys. Their 21st-century New York occasionally is frightening but it is rarely convincingly real."[6]
As of December 2011, Soylent Green has a 71% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 34 reviews.[7]
American Film Institute Lists
Soylent Green was released on laserdisc by MGM/UA in 1992 (ISBN 0792813995, OCLC 31684584).[10] In November 2007, Warner Home Video released the film on DVD concurrent with the DVD releases of Logan's Run and Outland, "two other '70s sci-fi classics."[11]
Soylent Green is referred to in a number of television series and other media, either for dramatic or comedic effect.
In the American crime drama television series Millennium (1996–1999), the main character Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) uses the phrase "Soylent Green is people" as a login to the Millennium Group Database.[12]
A 1993 episode of Saturday Night Live purported that Soylent Green had been made into a franchise, consisting of increasingly unsuccessful cinematic sequels. All clips shown played upon the dramatic final scene of the original film. A clip from the fifth sequel, Soylent Green II, shows Thorn (played by Charlton Heston (Phil Hartman)) crying, "Soylent Green is STILL made out of people! They didn't change the recipe like they said they were going to! It's STILL people!!".[13]
In the summer of 2011, a green wafer containing plankton was released under the name 'Soylent Green'. Created and produced by the Parallax Corporation,[14] and manufactured under official license, its packaging is an imaginary concept of how Soylent Green might have been sold.[15]
In an episode of Futurama Soylent green was the main cooking ingrediant in a parody of Iron chef called "Iron cook".
In the popular Half life 2 modification Zombie panic there is a level in which the players search for food, the food item when looked close at is a can of "Soylent Green". The can itself has a fuzzy image of what looks like nutritional facts on its backside.
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