In the far-flung future of 2022, mankind is losing the battle to feed itself.
In New York City, the population has exploded to 40 million people and there is
hardly room to breathe. A company called Soylent is doing its
best to feed the masses, but it has a terrible secret, one that people would
kill to protect.
Enter detective Frank Thorne,
who is tasked with investigating the murder of a rich industrialist, and who
begins unraveling a conspiracy that must be seen to be believed.
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With that out of the way, let's get back to the subject at hand.
As the sub-genre of eco-fiction began taking hold of science-fiction in the late 60s, writer Harry
Harrison published a serialized novel called "Make Room! Make Room!," a dystopic
portrait of an overcrowded 1999, where humanity has outgrown its capacity to
cultivate resources or provide adequate infrastructure. Meanwhile, in Hollywood,
the press agent and film producer Walter Seltzer was becoming good friends with
rising star Charlton Heston, with whom he would go on to collaborate on a total of
seven films before Seltzer's retirement in 1976. Seltzer and Heston had massive
political differences but they agreed on one thing: overpopulation was the most
important problem facing the modern world. Thus, they set out to make movies
highlighting the problem. starting with 1971's the Omega Man. Following that
movie's success, they approached Russell Thatcher and MGM with the idea of
adapting Harry Harrison's "Make Room! Make Room!"
And so MGM bought the rights from Harrison. A screenplay was commissioned
from playwright Stanley Greenberg, known at the time for his regular work on
television shows like The Nurses and The Defenders. He kept the core concepts of
the book intact but made a few significant changes, most notably
inserting the big reveal at the end about Soylent Green.
"Soylent Green" was also the new title after MGM feared using the book's, "Make
Room! Make Room!," would confuse people into thinking it was a film version of the
popular television series, Make Room for Granddaddy. Harrison absolutely hated
Greenberg's script and felt cheated by MGM, but he had no legal standing on which to
protest his inability to offer any creative input.
Despite this bad blood, MGM let him visit the set a few times and hand out copies
of his book to the cast and crew. With the script in place, Richard Fleischer,
known for directing films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
Fantastic Voyage and Tora! Tora! Tora!, was tapped to direct. Heston naturally signed
on to play the lead, a corrupt police detective whose investigation into the
mysterious death of a rich upper-class politician leads him to learn the secret
of Soylent Green. This was an unusual role for Heston, because Detective Thorne
is a noir-style antihero who doesn't overtly rally against his dystopic
society or show any sense of high morality.
He lies, steals, cheats, and even kills, all while being dirty and sweaty in pretty
much every scene. Heston had played anti-heroes and misanthropes in the past,
but Thorne is almost irredeemable by civilized standards, a product of the
broken and dying society he is a part of. The film's humanity, therefore, is
reserved for Heston's co-star: the legendary Edward G Robinson, a brilliant
Hollywood star who had been famous since the early 30s with his breakout
performance in Little Caesar. Robinson and Heston had worked together before--on
the Ten Commandments and during pre-production on Planet of the Apes--and
their friendship strengthens every scene in which they are together. When he read
the script for Soylent Green, Robinson was eager to do it, believing the film to
be more meaningful than the standard Hollywood fare. In the movie, Robinson
plays Sol, Thorne's roommate, an elderly scholar who has lived long enough to
remember what the world was like before things started falling apart. Robinson
was almost entirely deaf during filming, relying on visual cues and memorized
timing to deliver his performance. There were times where Fleischer would call
"cut" in the middle of a scene, but Robinson, not hearing it, would keep going
until somebody physically stopped him. He also had a clause in his contract that
limited the amount of hours he would work in a day, and it was obvious to all
that he was having health issues. He was a consummate professional, though,
and his acting is easily the film's highlight, even outshining the great
Charlton Heston. Unbeknownst to the cast and crew, however, Robinson, suffering from
late stage bladder cancer, was in fact dying during the film's production, and
he knew it. Soylent Green was his one hundred and
first screen performance, and also his last as he died 10 days after principal
photography was completed. Sol is the sentimental heart of the picture, with
his death scene marking the emotional and thematic climax of the film. It was
also the last scene Robinson ever performed, and though Heston was unaware
of Robinson's condition during filming, he has since recalled that it was one of
the most emotional scenes he's ever been a part of. Robinson's wife, who had been a
regular presence throughout production, refused to show up for it, knowing that
she simply wouldn't be able to take watching her husband pretend to die,
knowing that he would be dying in real life not long after.
For the female lead of Shurl, the furniture girl who has lost her
owner and attaches herself to Detective Thorn, economics-student-turned-actress
Leigh Taylor-Young was hired. Taylor-Young got her big break in the soap opera
Peyton Place, as a replacement for Mia Farrow, before moving on to work in film
throughout the late 60's and early 70's in movies like I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
and The Big Bounce. Soylent Green would prove to be her most famous work, though
I absolutely have to talk about her life in the years that followed it.
She largely quit acting for many years after Soylent Green, and though she did
continue acting in the 80's and beyond--even earning an Emmy for her work in
Picket Fences--she has done much more than act. She became a special advisor
for the UN, focusing on environmental issues and the media.
She's been a representative for numerous charitable organizations and
corporations, as well as acting as a kind of spiritual self-help guru, with audio
meditations and other forms of consciousness-raising based on the ideas
of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. She even presented one such
meditation to the UN. An ordained minister since the mid 70's, she currently
works with John Morton Ministries, which is devoted to "spiritual awareness,
individual and world peace, and charitable service to others."
Oh, and the leader of the organisation, John Morton, is her husband/life partner.
She goes by the name Leigh Taylor-Young Morton now.
"Hello. I'm Leigh Taylor-Young, and today I am visiting the Peace Awareness Labyrinth and Gardens."
Getting back to Soylent Green, though, her character represents one of
the most interesting and controversial additions to the story: its treatment of
women. The dystopia of Soylent Green is much more than just a parable about
scarcity and overpopulation; it also touches on dehumanization, how
environmental problems can cause social collapse and lead to regressions in
government and human rights. In the same year as Roe v. Wade, while the president
was pushing states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, Soylent Green dared to
show people a future in which the sexual revolution had been utterly lost by
women, who were now treated not just as slaves but as actual furniture.
Many exterior shots were filmed on an old MGM backlot, and Soylent Green was the last
film to use it before it was torn down. This lends the outdoor sets an air of
past glory and creeping decrepitude, which is absolutely what the film was
going for. During filming, Fleischer inserted an improvised scene in which
Thorn and Sol share a meal together to demonstrate how little Thorn knows about
real food and how fondly Sol remembers it. Also, this videogame cabinet for
Computer Space--a real game designed by the same guy who made Pong and founded
Atari--is actually the first instance of a video game appearing in a major motion
picture.
Soylent Green released in April of 1973 and earned a domestic box office gross of
around 3.6 million dollars. While I can't find reliable information about the
film's budget, it seems the film made a small profit,
though not enough to be considered much of a hit. Similarly, it received mixed reviews
at the time that trended more positive than negative, with consistent praises
given to the acting. However, Soylent Green would go on to be a cultural
landmark. It is one of the best examples of eco-fiction in film and is
consistently referenced in pop culture to this day. Disturbingly, there's even a
meal replacement shake on the market named "Soylent," with an advertising
campaign that seems just a little too on-the-nose to be a coincidence.
Ok, now for the part where I'm going to get political, so let me offer one last
warning: I am about to share my opinions on a thorny, politically-charged topic.
If you can't handle that, feel free to skip ahead to this time:
Still here? Alright then.
[prepatory deep breath]
While overpopulation and its associated
problems are real, especially in the more disadvantaged parts of the world such as
sub-Saharan Africa and certain parts of Asia, the real world predictions made by
the so called experts like Paul Ehrlich-- whose treatise on overpopulation, 1968's
The Population Bomb, is still cited as a seminal and important work of
environmentalist literature--proved to be way off the mark.
Worse still, the alarmism such predictions sparked led to
well-documented human rights abuses like forced sterilization campaigns in Mexico,
Egypt, Pakistan, Peru, and elsewhere, not to mention the now dead one-child policy of
China and its associated horrors. The numbers consistently show that, in the
developed world at least, overpopulation is an exaggerated fear. Through
technological advancements, gradual social change, and improved agriculture,
populations tend to stabilize before they outgrow the available resources.
Humanity as a whole is more prosperous today than it was yesterday, and that
trend is more persistent than the rapidly slowing trend of population
growth. Ehrlich himself famously predicted that the world would basically
end by the mid-80's, that overpopulation would become so extreme that even
Soylent Green's vision of 2022 would prove to be optimistic. People just happen to
find dire predictions more compelling than mundanely positive ones, no matter
how many times they're proven wrong. That's human nature.
I don't lay any of these politics at Soylent Green's feet, though. As a dystopia, it is of course a
dramatic exaggeration designed to make a salient point about society and humanity,
a point that is still perfectly valid and provocative. Indeed, there are parts
of the world today that look an awful lot like the crowded and corrupt New
York City of Soylent Green, and it's not hard to imagine a societal breakdown of
some sort that could get even the most advanced parts of the world to that
point in a short amount of time, especially in conjunction with manmade
climate change, the dangers of agricultural monoculture, urban
desertification, political corruption, dehumanization campaigns, and the
anti-GMO movement doing its best to prevent science from solving world hunger.
In its own way, Soylent Green is certainly just as prescient and relevant now as it
was in 1973, perhaps even moreso. Besides, it's a good movie on its own merits.
It's just that alarmism, in the real world, should always be taken with a
grain of salt. Concern and activism are good things, but panic inevitably leads
to disaster, especially when heavy-handed governments get involved. When people
start demanding that action be taken to "control the population," as
Richard Fleischer does during the audio commentary of his film, that should be
far scarier than overpopulation. Perhaps this is why I prefer conservationism to
environmentalism, why I'm more likely to queue up Silent Running than I am
Soylent Green. Anyway, I'm sure many of you passionately disagree with me, and
you can feel free to rant about it in the comments below. Just try to keep it
civil, please.
Regardless of the underlying politics, Soylent Green is a
well-made film that shouldn't be dismissed.
Heston and Seltzer set out to make an important film that had something to say,
and they succeeded, whether you agree with them or not. It presents one of the
most well-realized and terrifying dystopias ever put to film, and it comes
from a time and place of deep concern and social turmoil. No matter what you
take away from it, Soylent Green is sure to make a lasting impression.
And that's all for today, my fellow earthlings. What do you think: is Soylent Green the best
sci-fi environmentalist movie, or are you more keen on something more contemporary
like Avatar, The Day After Tomorrow, or even Wall-E? Let me know in the comments.
In the meantime, don't forget to like and subscribe, if you haven't done so already,
and make sure to check out my Patreon, where you can get your name in the
credits, vote on future video topics, and much more. I also have a website at
emagill.com, where you can find plenty of written reviews of sci-fi classics in
both film and literature. Until next time, when we'll be visiting a certain horror-
filled island, this is The Unapologetic Geek, telling you to never be ashamed of
what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"I like you.
You're a hell of a piece of furniture."