PG | 1h 37min | Science Fiction, Thriller | 1973
Before he became a sci-fi writer, Harry Harrison was an illustrator for sci-fi comics. His most famous novel, “Make Room! Make Room!” (1966), was so visually compelling that filmmaker Richard Fleischer adapted it into the dystopian thriller “Soylent Green” (1973), based on Stanley R. Greenberg’s screenplay.
Fittingly, Fleischer as director, his cinematographer Richard H. Kline, editor Samuel E. Beetley, and score composer Fred Myrow open their movie with an arresting, comic-book-like montage. It illustrates mankind’s all-too-hurried transition from a languid, 19th-century agrarian economy to a whirling 20th-century industrial economy.
First, soft, mild music accompanies a slow succession of images of hillocks, boats, and horse-drawn vehicles. We see only a handful of people: children and adults sitting, standing, and indulging in leisurely activities (fishing, farming, and the like).
The Future Is Now
The film isn’t set in 1973, when it hit the big screen, but decades into the future.It’s 2022, the place is New York City, and the population is 40 million.
Those opening sights and sounds continue in apocalyptic fervor. Civic broadcasts announce a curfew one minute and a vegetable concentrate that’s available the very next. And what exactly is this miracle substance? It’s the “new, delicious Soylent Green, the miracle food of higher-energy plankton from the ocean.” Or so we’re told.
Soylent Corporation, it turns out, controls half the world’s food supply and at least some bureaucratic elements within a powerful state. Its spinoff products flood the market: Soylent soybeans, Soylent buns, Soylent crumbs.
As irate crowds protest against a drying up of Soylent supplies, a ruthless state enlists earthmovers, not just riot police, to disperse and silence them.
The movie explains how greedy corporations that promise paradise to desperate consumers are, in short, liars. No different from governments that lie to their citizens. One such liar on Soylent’s board, Mr. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), pays for his lies with his life.
One of the movie’s subplots is about Detective Thorn (Charlton Heston) and his aging aide Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), who are trying to track down Simonson’s killers. Another is about the woman from Simonson’s mansion, Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), who falls for Thorn. Neither subplot is gripping enough on its own, but worked into the main story, they add to the overriding drama of mankind’s wanton self-destruction.
In a scene meant to illuminate the little things that we take for granted, Heston’s eyes light up, startled at seeing nature at its unselfconscious best: animals, plants, flowers, birds, trees, hills, rivers, fish, oceans, clouds, the sky, the sun. All breathtaking, not by “doing” anything spectacular but merely by “being.”
Food, water, housing, and energy shortages are so acute that the very sight of a strip of edible beef, warm water gushing from a tap, or a fragrant bar of soap is enough to drive a person to tears.
A New Generation of Sci-Fi Film
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a new breed of sci-fi films and scripts with greater depth than the B-movies of the 1950s. What’s more, well before the cult status of George Lucas’s “Star Wars” (1977) and Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), these newer films were backed by big studios and big budgets: “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), “Planet of the Apes” (1968), “The Omega Man” (1971), and “Soylent Green” (1973).And, irony of ironies, sword-and-sandal star Heston starred in three of these four genre-defining movies. Here Heston looks older than the 50-year-old he was at the time, but he is surprisingly agile, often handrailing his way up and down steep staircases.
Fleischer portrays the paranoia of a vulnerable public by presenting Thorn as both an instrument and an object of state intrusion. As the long arm of the law, Thorn barges into homes, unrepentantly frisks women, searches and seizes without warrant; he is a thief in broad daylight, not always in the service of his investigation. Later, the tables are turned as nameless, powerful vested interests spy on him, stalk him, and shoot at him.
Fleischer’s narrative style enforces claustrophobia. His characters are sweating, sighing, nearly suffocating in oppressive heat. When ordinary folk are not lining up to claim water rations, they’re lining up to claim benefits after a death in their family.
Like many good sci-fi films, “Soylent Green” instills both terror and awe. By magnifying a terrifying present filled with despair, it hints at an alternative future filled with hope.
In some scenes, Fleischer and Greenberg play on the word “home” with more than a touch of irony. Of course, home is a metaphor for Earth, our world, but it’s also something more. At one point Roth ruefully tells Thorn, “I should have gone home long ago.” Home here isn’t just the house we used to live in and now want to return to. It is a refuge, a balm to our body, mind, and spirit. It is as salvific as death itself, granting us escape from a life of misery.
But home can also be a return to our senses, a more clearsighted view of the terrors we have wrought on ourselves, opening our eyes to what we’ve habitually shut them to.
For all its ominous signs and symbols, “Soylent Green” is an invitation to create a new Earth by creating new life on it. It is a call to live more meaningfully, to be more respectful of nature, and so, more reverential toward life in all its forms.
