Soylent Green

Would you like some salt with that?

Soylent Green is set in the year 2022. Back in 1973, that must’ve seemed pretty futur­is­tic, and yet close enough for the movie’s grim mes­sage to strike fear into the hearts of a cin­ema going public.

In some ways, it must also have been very reas­sur­ing. No mat­ter that the world, fifty years down the line, would turn to shit. The 1970s man about town could tug his lit­tle cap over his fringe, run a fin­ger across a smoothly pressed col­lar, pull a comb through his griz­zled side­burns, and tie his neck­er­chief just so, secure in the knowl­edge that his fash­ion sense would never fail him.

That’s not all. Where mobile phones are now com­mon­place, Soy­lent Green still has Charl­ton Hes­ton using a land­line housed in a huge metal box fas­tened to a wall in the street.

The graph­ics on the new Wii were amazing!

We also see an “advanced” arcade machine, all black and white vec­tor graph­ics, and bleepy-bloopy sound effects, in a rich man’s apartment.

To be hon­est though, it’s almost too easy to laugh at sci­ence fic­tion movies that have become hideously dated by their choice of clothes and sur­round­ings. Their job isn’t really to pre­dict the minute detail of every­day life. I’d say that sort of thing is pretty impos­si­ble. What good sci­ence fic­tion can do, is look at where we are today, at what we’re doing wrong, and imag­ine the future con­se­quences of that in a broader, big­ger pic­ture kind of way.

Soy­lent Green’s mes­sage is one of over­pop­u­la­tion, food short­ages, and global warm­ing. Stuff that’s still rel­e­vant, if not more so, now that we’re closer to the year Soy­lent Green is set in.

Besides, look closer, and you’ll see that the sev­en­ties fash­ions are actu­ally hid­ing some pretty state of the art tech­nol­ogy, designed to com­bat the warmer tem­per­a­tures caused by man’s envi­ron­men­tal med­dling. No, really.

The plot has prob­a­bly one of the most famous twists in movie his­tory. A search on the inter­net for the movie’s title will quickly throw up the story’s last line, ruin­ing the twist in the process, so I’d advise against it if you’ve never seen the film. Even know­ing the out­come, there’s still lots to enjoy though.

Charl­ton Hes­ton plays a cop who’s been sent to inves­ti­gate the mur­der of an exec­u­tive of the Soy­lent com­pany in his plush apart­ment. Soy­lent pro­duces the veg­etable wafers that help feed the mil­lions of starv­ing peo­ple liv­ing in abject poverty. Whilst there, Hes­ton’s cop ques­tions the live-in pros­ti­tute, charm­ingly referred to as “furniture”.

He also robs the apart­ment in front of the dead executive’s body­guard, stuff­ing a pil­low case with fruit, veg­eta­bles, a slice of beef, a towel and bars of soap. What I like about this scene is that despite some ini­tial dis­agree­ment, the body­guard barely does a thing to stop him. Even if he reported Hes­ton, there’d be lit­tle in the way of reper­cus­sion. His supe­ri­ors prob­a­bly wouldn’t give a shit. It’s like there’s an under­stand­ing that times are seri­ously hard, real food and lux­u­ries are scarce, so who can begrudge a cop for help­ing him­self? Hes­ton even pops back later for casual sex ses­sions with the apartment’s “fur­ni­ture”, mak­ing sure to take advan­tage of the shower facilities.

Soy­lent Green makes a big thing of the lit­tle things. Real food, hot run­ning water, elec­tric light­ing, and so on. But now only the mega rich can afford them in any quan­tity. Edward G. Robin­son, play­ing Hes­ton’s old aged roomie, is shown an extremely rare, fresh slab of beef, only to break down in tears over the tragedy of it all, over every­thing that has been lost.

Even though the mur­der of the Soy­lent exec­u­tive is the story’s pri­mary thrust and the basis of the twist, for me, the film’s true cen­tre­piece is the assisted sui­cide: beau­ti­ful, sad, and some­what dis­turb­ing, it helps to ham­mer home the mes­sage that we move through our mod­ern lives, tak­ing far too much of it for granted. Only when it’s all gone, will we realise how good we had it.

And the Advanced Sweat Fil­tra­tion Sys­tem? I’m all over the patent for that one!