Soylent Green
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Richard Fleischer
Produced by	Walter Seltzer Russel Thacher
Written by	Harry Harrison (novel) Stanley R. Greenberg (screenplay)
Starring	Charlton Heston Leigh Taylor-Young Edward G. Robinson
Distributed by	Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Release date(s)	May 9, 1973
Running time	97 min
Language	English
IMDb profile

Soylent Green is a 1973 science fiction movie starring Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Joseph Cotten and Chuck Connors. It is loosely based upon the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison, about overpopulation, but it diverges to its own plot points and ideas.

Soylent green is the supposedly natural, but really artificial, plankton food product at the center of the story. Because of the film's cult popularity, the term "soylent green" and the famous last line "Soylent Green is people!" have become catch phrases in English. Many subsequent works refer to Soylent Green for either dramatic or comedic effect.

Sources

The original 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! is set in the year 1999, with the theme of overpopulation and overuse of resources leading to increasing social disorder as the next millennium approaches. It mentions "soylent steaks", but makes no reference to "Soylent Green" or to the movie's themes of euthanasia and cannibalism. These themes were used after earlier attempts to get the movie made had failed due to lack of studio interest.

The book's title was not used for the movie since it could have confused audiences into thinking it was a big-screen version of Make Room for Daddy.^[1]

Synopsis

Set in the year 2022, Soylent Green depicts a dystopia, a Malthusian catastrophe that occurs because humanity has failed to pursue sustainable development and has not halted uncontrolled population growth; New York City's population is 40,000,000, with more than half of it unemployed. Air and water pollution have produced a year-round heatwave and a thin, yellow, daytime smog. Food and fuel are scarce resources because of animal and plant decimation and soil poisoning, housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and widespread government-sponsored euthanasia is encouraged to control and reduce overpopulation.

Meat, bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables, and even alcoholic beverages are scarce and extremely expensive; for example, a six-ounce jar of strawberry jam is 150 "Ds" (US Dollars). Like the soylent food factories, the farms producing foodstuffs are heavily guarded and off-limits to civilians. For most of the populace, natural foods are a rarely, if ever, enjoyed luxury. The government dispenses rations of synthetic food — soylent yellow, soylent red — made by the Soylent Corporation; their newest and most popular version, soylent green, is made from plankton, according to the food firm.

Soylent green

Soylent's food products are mostly distributed as brightly colored crackers which may be eaten with margarine, although they are also seen being sold as bread-like buns and in crumb form. The word "soylent" is a portmanteau combining soybean and lentil (cheap, very high-yield crops).^{[citation needed]}

Specific Soylent products are distributed to the populace on different days of the week, yet even then those supplies are limited and there is much competition among people to get their rations early. The competition is such that if the supply is exhausted, rioting for food is common. To deal with this problem, the distribution centers are heavily guarded by police who deal with rioters very heavy-handedly, using "scoops" — half-loader, half-garbage truck vehicles which scoop up rioters and dump them in rear storage units; such callous, violent treatment is presumably fatal to some rioters.

In contrast, the rich elite live in spacious apartments, with regular access to real food, tobacco, and alcohol, though they often are of poor quality. Some of the rich can even afford "furniture", the film's term for concubines economically attached to the apartments.

Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is a New York City police detective investigating the murder of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten), a director of the Soylent Corporation. Thorn lives with his aged "police book" partner Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) in a one-room tenement apartment. Long before, Sol was a college professor, but now is employed as a police researcher. Unlike most people in A.D. 2022, including Thorn, Sol received a formal education and is literate; education of any sort is available only to the wealthy elite. Sol and people such as he are known as "books", because real books are out of print, as there is no wood for paper, along with electricity, water, food, and printing press shortages.

Thorn has a brief romance with Shirl, (Leigh Taylor-Young), a "furniture" girl attached to a rich apartment's owner in Chelsea. At one point in the film, Shirl wanted to move in with Thorn, but Thorn insisted she stay in the apartment because life was so much better there.

During his investigation of Simonson's murder, Thorn slowly uncovers a conspiracy, centered around the Soylent corporation. When the dispirited Sol opts for euthanasia, Thorn forcibly follows him, and makes two shocking discoveries. First, he sees motion pictures of the beautiful Earth of former times, shown only to those being euthanised, which brings him to tears. Second, after Thorn is unable to stop Sol's death, he follows the disposal of Sol's body to a heavily guarded waste-management plant, and discovers that Soylent green is made from the recycled cadavers brought in from the government-sponsored euthanasia centers. This leads to his famous outcry, "Soylent Green is people!"

Music

The "going home" score was conducted by Gerald Fried and consists of the main themes from

• Symphony No. 6 ("Pathétique") by Tchaikovsky
• Symphony No. 6 ("Pastoral") by Beethoven
• "Morning Mood" and "Åse's Death" from the Peer Gynt Suite by Edvard Grieg

Trivia

• Charlton Heston's tears at Sol's death were real, as Heston was the only cast member who knew that Edward G. Robinson was dying of terminal cancer. This was the 90th and last movie in which Robinson appeared. He died nine days after the shooting was done, on January 26, 1973. They also worked together on The Ten Commandments.
• The female lead character, Shirl, (Leigh Taylor-Young) is briefly seen operating a Computer Space arcade game, marking the movie as one of the first to show the emerging pop cultural phenomenon of video games.
• This was the last feature film to have exteriors shot using the old MGM back lot.
• Chuck Connors had a hard time fighting Heston in the movie because he didn't like hitting "Moses", Heston's role in the film The Ten Commandments.
• In the television show Millennium, the main character Frank Black's voice-activated pass phrase to enter the Millennium Group's network is "Soylent green is people." The pass phrase was chosen by his nerdy computer tech, because his tech wanted to preserve awareness of the film.

References

See also

• Twist ending

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Soylent Green

• Soylent Green at the Internet Movie Database
• Soylent Green at Rotten Tomatoes
• Review of Soylent Green
• SciFlicks.com review
• SciFlicks.com "Soylent green is people" sound clip
• SCIFI.com review

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