- Based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, Soylent Green plays like a longer, lesser episode of The Twilight Zone. If director Richard Fleischer had cut out the film's first hour and bookended the rest with wry Rod Serling commentary, I might have enjoyed it. As it was, I sat through this dull slog of a film just to get to a punchline that everyone's already heard. Between this and Snowpiercer, I'm starting to think that I'm not the target audience for dystopian cannibalism flicks.
- The setting is New York City and the year 2024. Humanity has finally exceeded the planet's carrying capacity and is in the midst of experiencing a Malthusian catastrophe. In fact, the city is so crowded that you can't even walk down the stairs without having to navigate around a few dozen sleeping bodies. The story opens with the murder of eminent citizen William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotton), an executive for the Soylent Corporation, which feeds the city with its heavily processed food wafers. Detective Frank Thorn (Charlton Heston) suspects the man's bodyguard (Chuck Connors), hardly imagining that this routine investigation will lead him to a startling discovery concerning the newest food product, Soylent Green.
- My favorite part of Soylent Green is the completely strange way that Thorn's older friend Sol (Edward G. Robinson) reacts to his discovery concerning Soylent Green. Rather than reporting it to the police, he up and runs to an assisted suicide clinic that plays classical music over a series of hypnotic nature images projected in the style of a planetarium show. It's such a bizarre situation that I couldn't help but smile, while at the same time regretting the fact that this would be the eminently talented Robinson's final film role. The rest of the movie is a pretty forgettable dystopian sci-fi that tries to be edgy by making its detective a bully, referring to women (Leigh Taylor-Young) as furniture, and making cannibalism into a punchline. That's not edgy, it's stupid.
- Also featuring Brock Peters and Dick Van Patten.
