Washington Post Article Says "Soylent Green" Got It Right

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Interesting, but take this analysis with a bit of salt.

In 1973, 'Soylent Green' envisioned the world in 2022. It got a lot right.

The year is 2022. Our overpopulated planet is experiencing catastrophic climate change, megacorporations have excessive power over the government, and clean living is a luxury only the 1 percent can afford. It may read like a scan of the front-page headlines, but these predictions were laid out...

news.yahoo.com

 

[BAYLOR]

Interesting, but take this analysis with a bit of salt.

In 1973, 'Soylent Green' envisioned the world in 2022. It got a lot right.

The year is 2022. Our overpopulated planet is experiencing catastrophic climate change, megacorporations have excessive power over the government, and clean living is a luxury only the 1 percent can afford. It may read like a scan of the front-page headlines, but these predictions were laid out...

news.yahoo.com

Its amazing how close they actual got things



The End of The Dream by Philip Wylie also made some interesting predictions.

 

[BAYLOR]

Here's hoping that we find solutions.

 

[Pyan]

Love the way it gives all the credit to the filmmakers, with one mention of Harry Harrison in passing. "Hollywood's prognosticators got it right..." , indeed!

 

[Robert Zwilling]

The original story was set in 1999. Apparently Hollywood thought that 1999 didn't have the same box office appeal as 2022, or maybe they thought it would scare people. Back then there were a lot of predictions made by people in general and authors that have come into being. Those were broad based predictions based on large scale events. Ideas were put into motion, laws were passed. Because there was a lot less going on, life was still simple, it was probably easier to see how things were progressing. We have entered a time where small events can regularly have far reaching results. Technology is into everything and everywhere, amplifying the actions of groups as well as individuals, continually making so many leaps and bounds that the number of possibilities have increased exponentially, making it far harder (or easier?) to predict what will happen next. It seems like you can say just about anything and it just might happen, or just as easily not happen.

 

[Valtharius]

Incredibly silly analysis. It fascinates me how some people are so addicted to hyperbole.

 

[BAYLOR]

The 70's produced a number of interesting an unsettling science fiction films besides Soylent Green . The Film Silent Running with Bruce Darn come to mind which also had dire message and prediction bout the future.

 

[paranoid marvin]

The 70's produced a number of interesting an unsettling science fiction films besides Soylent Green . The Film Silent Running with Bruce Darn come to mind which also had dire message and prediction bout the future.

I think you can include the mid 60s-1980 here. Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man (both with Heston) along with Rollerball, Saturn 3, Logan's Run, Alien (and many more) - where the future isn't all that bright and human life is cheap.

 

[BAYLOR]

I think you can include the mid 60s-1980 here. Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man (both with Heston) along with Rollerball, Saturn 3, Logan's Run, Alien (and many more) - where the future isn't all that bright and human life is cheap.

Saturn 3 had all the elements of a good film . The problem was the script and story, direction and editing was a jumbled mess. Id like to see them rebooted this one .

 

[KGeo777]

Saturn 3 was an example of a studio film to cash in on the sci-fi trend but they were doing it paint by numbers. The director was known for musicals.


Soylent Green suggested plant life couldn't survive in a city.
Silent Running did this too--the idea that wild Nature is weaker and separate from humanity. A Biblical worldview. Armageddon.


Planet of the Apes had the best apocalyptic scenario--it was more nuanced than later ones. Taylor was a disillusioned idealist who pretended to be a misanthropic cynic, and then after he is humiliated, he becomes a champion of humanity-his ego shows----until he realizes his original fears came true.
We don't know for certain how the Earth was ravaged--could have been a comet or solar flares hitting the earth and causing some radioactive catastrophe--Taylor assumed it was weapons of war. It doesn't matter, it was how he perceived it.

There was a lot of fearmongering about the Bomb (in fact a new Christopher Nolan movie on the A Bomb is coming now)--I heard a few years back, a theory that nukes could be a hoax. Blew my mind because I had never heard it before. The Moon hoax is understandable politics---it is the US space program that is questioned as real--not the Soviet one. Despite the fact that the USSR had bread lines, somehow they had an advanced space program. It's an attack on the morale of the US. The message is "your society sucks."

I think fearmongering about the bomb is similar--Orwell predicted it. He was confident the nuke would never be used except to scare countries.

I wonder why nuke tests moved underground when consumer camera tech became ubiquitous.

If Tesla, Edison or Von Braun were said to have worked on the bomb, I would be concerned.

I have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

 

[BAYLOR]

Saturn 3 was an example of a studio film to cash in on the sci-fi trend but they were doing it paint by numbers. The director was known for musicals.


Soylent Green suggested plant life couldn't survive in a city.
Silent Running did this too--the idea that wild Nature is weaker and separate from humanity. A Biblical worldview. Armageddon.


Planet of the Apes had the best apocalyptic scenario--it was more nuanced than later ones. Taylor was a disillusioned idealist who pretended to be a misanthropic cynic, and then after he is humiliated, he becomes a champion of humanity-his ego shows----until he realizes his original fears came true.
We don't know for certain how the Earth was ravaged--could have been a comet or solar flares hitting the earth and causing some radioactive catastrophe--Taylor assumed it was weapons of war. It doesn't matter, it was how he perceived it.

There was a lot of fearmongering about the Bomb (in fact a new Christopher Nolan movie on the A Bomb is coming now)--I heard a few years back, a theory that nukes could be a hoax. Blew my mind because I had never heard it before. The Moon hoax is understandable politics---it is the US space program that is questioned as real--not the Soviet one. Despite the fact that the USSR had bread lines, somehow they had an advanced space program. It's an attack on the morale of the US. The message is "your society sucks."

I think fearmongering about the bomb is similar--Orwell predicted it. He was confident the nuke would never be used except to scare countries.

I wonder why nuke tests moved underground when consumer camera tech became ubiquitous.

If Tesla, Edison or Von Braun were said to have worked on the bomb, I would be concerned.

I have learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

There was a story that after Tesla died in 1943 some of his papers went missing.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

After Telsa died, his nephew went to Telsa's hotel room and found that it had been searched. He said some technical papers and a black notebook were missing. 3 days later, an uncle of president Trump, Dr John G. Trump, MIT professor, was given papers from the hotel room to examine. He said what was there of the last 15 years of Telsa's life was speculative, promotional, philosophical, but nothing practical was there. Just after WWII, some of his papers concerning particle beam weapons were sent to Patterson Air Force base. Details of those tests were never published and those papers also disappeared.

Telsa's papers

 

[BAYLOR]

After Telsa died, his nephew went to Telsa's hotel room and found that it had been searched. He said some technical papers and a black notebook were missing. 3 days later, an uncle of president Trump, Dr John G. Trump, MIT professor, was given papers from the hotel room to examine. He said what was there of the last 15 years of Telsa's life was speculative, promotional, philosophical, but nothing practical was there. Just after WWII, some of his papers concerning particle beam weapons were sent to Patterson Air Force base. Details of those tests were never published and those papers also disappeared.

Telsa's papers

Its the stuff of conspiracy theories. The was a tv show that build a lighting device weapon ? Based on a Tesla design and got it to work.

 

[farntfar]

The article goes through several ideas: Synthetic food; Overcrowding; Climate change; Assisted dying; and video games. And says that Soylent Green "predicted" them all, but vastly played up their effect when compared to today. (A142 people have gone to Switzerland for assisted dying. It does actually dip below 90° even in summer. etc) It then made some fairly weak conclusions about how accurate it was.

It's predictions were possibly accurate in a vague sort of way, but certainly not quantitatively accurate. Furthermore several other films and TV shows (Star Trek to name but one) had already covered several of the ideas, and all 5 had been used as themes in other genres of artistic expression (books, art, music etc) before that.

I remember seeing Soylent Green when it came out, and enjoying it. But I wasn't stunned by any awesome new ideas.

 

[KGeo777]

They didn't emphasize the importance of media control in SG like some other movies did--Fahrenheit 451.


Is there any movie or story that predicted coerced gender surgery--and for children?
This seems like a new territory.
Couldn't even imagine it ten years ago. Who would have believed it possible.

The villain in WILD WILD PLANET wants to turn himself (and someone else) into a hermaphrodite.

There's a scene in The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue where a guy is leaving the city and among the crowds on the street, we see a man wearing a surgical mask in public and that is followed by the appearance of a nude person walking around the street.
The gist of the scene was that the city was full of weirdos and he was better off in the countryside.

 

[BAYLOR]

They didn't emphasize the importance of media control in SG like some other movies did--Fahrenheit 451.


Is there any movie or story that predicted coerced gender surgery--and for children?
This seems like a new territory.
Couldn't even imagine it ten years ago. Who would have believed it possible.

The villain in WILD WILD PLANET wants to turn himself (and someone else) into a hermaphrodite.

There's a scene in The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue where a guy is leaving the city and among the crowds on the street, we see a man wearing a surgical mask in public and that is followed by the appearance of a nude person walking around the street.
The gist of the scene was that the city was full of weirdos and he was better off in the countryside.

Ive seen Wild Wild Planet , very strange film. I seem to recall there other films with these character or am I misremembering . On such film has them encountering a race of invading hairy humanoids who live on a cold earth like planet that orbited 5th from its sun . Another film, they encounter these bodiless beings who are looking for Host humans to inhabit.

 

[KGeo777]

Ive seen Wild Wild Planet , very strange film. I seem to recall there other films with these character or am I misremembering . On such film has them encountering a race of invading hairy humanoids who live on a cold earth like planet that orbited 5th from its sun .

That's one of the sequels--The Snow Devils.

 

[BAYLOR]

That's one of the sequels--The Snow Devils.

How many films in all , in this series ?

 

[KGeo777]

How many films in all , in this series ?

Technically 4 in the Gamma One series -War of the Planets and War Between the Planets are the other two-but The Green Slime has some relationship to the series as well.

 

[BAYLOR]

Technically 4 in the Gamma One series -War of the Planets and War Between the Planets are the other two-but The Green Slime has some relationship to the series as well.

They were entertaining films.

There are reboot possibilities here. maybe even tv series based off of these films ?