Soylent Green, your thoughts on this film 50 years on.

[Vladd67]

Soylent Green (1973) • 50 Years Later

In a dystopian future, a cop stumbles across a powerful corporation’s horrifying plan to feed humanity…

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What are your thoughts on this dystopian story of over population and resources shortage?

 

[Elentarri]

I haven't watched the movie or read the story it's based on, but, as far as I can tell, the people running the show/planet are using all those dystopia novels as instruction manuals.

And then you have sh*t like this: Ellen DeGeneres salami? One company's quest to make meat from celebrity tissue samples
Biosludge spread on food crops will soon contain dead human tissue as Washington legalizes “human composting”
Human remains in cattle feed may have caused mad cow epidemic

 

[Foxbat]

I think it's still a powerful movie and still relevant. Many dystopian movies, I think, often age well because they are dealing with forms of decay rather than progress and so tend to look at least contemporary or even before our own time.

 

[Rodders]

I have a huge soft spot for the SF of Charlton Heston. I thought Soylent Green looked fantastic and the overpopulation and subsequent hunger was a great plot. I think this would be an ideal movie for a remake.

The plot twist at the end isn't perhaps as great as the one at the end of the Planet of the Apes, but it's still a great ending.

 

[farntfar]

Some very powerful images remain clearly in my head from all that time ago.
Edward G. Robinson "falling asleep" to the sound of Vivaldi's Spring, and the walls covered in pictures of fields and forests with deers scampering. (An image reused in several other films I think, and at least one French(?) music video)
Heston running along pipework from the death chamber to the "factory"
And most powerfully of all bulldozers scooping up the protesting (and starving) mob.

 

[BAYLOR]

It's a bit dated as all science fiction film become but overall , is at still a great film. It was also Edward G. Robinson's final film. At time that he was work in this film , he was dying of cancer , He died 3 weeks after the film's completion.

 

[BAYLOR]

You have an overpopulated world with extreme. poverty , A seriously degraded and compromise physical environment so bad that even basic survival food production to feed this huge population is all but impossible. Yes we moved the timeline of the book and film but, the scenario of that world is still quite plausible.

 

[KiraAnn]

It was a pretty good film, overall. The "moral" of the story places it firmly in the Malthusian/Erlich camp of pessimism, though, which I don't really give credit to.

BTW, get your Soylent here: Soylent Green

 

[Vladd67]

It was a pretty good film, overall. The "moral" of the story places it firmly in the Malthusian/Erlich camp of pessimism, though, which I don't really give credit to.

BTW, get your Soylent here: Soylent Green

Worryingly there are two green Soylents, one is unavailable and one is out of stock. Somebody got something to hide?

 

[KGeo777]

I think the film displays the paranoid demoralization which Hollywood was steeped in at the time.
Part of it was a reflection of ecological warnings, overpopulation, pollution, fear of the future, corporate power, etc. Mass consumerism.
I wonder if this is the first time Charlton Heston ever wept in a movie--when he is watching Edward G Robinson and the footage of Nature.


Maybe its biggest conceit is the idea that Nature is so fragile to human manipulation. One tree left in New York.
Nature is tougher than that. A vacant lot gets turned into a wild place pretty quickly when left to itself.


Mmm I could go for some Soylent Blue or Orange buns right about now. So bright and crunchy.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Brilliant movie, and a poignant film for Edward G Robinson to bow out to. What must have been going through his head in his final scene in the movie, given his medical condition? He was a more versatile actor than the gangster persona for which he was famous.

 

[BAYLOR]

Brilliant movie, and a poignant film for Edward G Robinson to bow out to. What must have been going through his head in his final scene in the movie, given his medical condition? He was a more versatile actor than the gangster persona for which he was famous.

He was supposed to be up for the role of Dr Zaius in Planet of the Apes, there's even test footage of him Charlton Heston and James Brolin, but his doctor told him his health wasn't good enough to deal with the rigors of the makeup and filming.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Soylent Green has simple sets, but the movie comes through loud and clear. It doesn't need to be literally true, it uses just enough facts to inflate simple ideas into a grand picture. Edward G Robinson was a master of many different kinds of roles. His send off was quite memorable. The way things have turned out, it seems like it is humanity that is more susceptible to the whims of nature than the other way around. A little known fact about the blue green bacteria making all that oxygen is that if the environment isn't that great for it, it doesn't die, it just reverts to a form that recycles carbon dioxide and water back and forth, getting enough energy for it to survive, but no extra energy expended towards making free oxygen.

 

[BAYLOR]

Soylent Green has simple sets, but the movie comes through loud and clear. It doesn't need to be literally true, it uses just enough facts to inflate simple ideas into a grand picture. Edward G Robinson was a master of many different kinds of roles. His send off was quite memorable. The way things have turned out, it seems like it is humanity that is more susceptible to the whims of nature than the other way around. A little known fact about the blue green bacteria making all that oxygen is that if the environment isn't that great for it, it doesn't die, it just reverts to a form that recycles carbon dioxide and water back and forth, getting enough energy for it to survive, but no extra energy expended towards making free oxygen.

The film used the term Green House effect.

 

[harveststar]

Good journalism.

 

[Finch]

The film it is not too bad . Compared to most modern films, it is relatively short and overall entertaining . If you want to take a more critical view. It is very loosely based on the book Make Room, Make Room . The book is about overpopulation and inequalities between the haves and the have nots . It was centred on a overpopulated New York, and as a prediction, it was completely wrong . Had Harry Harrison chosen Delhi, with its current population of over 32 million, it would be closer to the truth. The film was actually a bit of a dogs dinner . Charlton Heston plays the macho rogue detective , investigating a murder of one of the elite. Females are described furniture, and Heston's sex scene is where he effectively rapes one of them .The odd bit of drama , bring on the shovels . A sentimental death scene, and finally the horror , cannibalism.

 

[BAYLOR]

In some ways it's not so far fetched.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

I think it's a very simple metaphorical commentary about today's world which gets more extreme every year while Soylent Green looks more mundane each year. Someday it might just be a simple murder mystery like Chinatown.

 

[BAYLOR]

I think it's a very simple metaphorical commentary about today's world which gets more extreme every year while Soylent Green looks more mundane each year. Someday it might just be a simple murder mystery like Chinatown.

What is sad about t that film beyond the subject matter, is that it was Edward G .Robinsons final film. He was such great actor, best ever to come out of Hollywood s golden. The film was great send off for him .

 

[Rodders]

We should have an old movie film club, Baylor. I'd love to rewatch some of these movies.