Soylent Green is a 1973 dystopian science fiction movie depicting a future in which overpopulation leads to depleted resources on earth. This leads to widespread unemployment and poverty. Real fruit, vegetables, and meat are rare, commodities are expensive, and much of the population survives on processed food rations, including "soylent green" wafers.
The film overlays the science fiction and police procedural genres as it depicts the efforts of New York City police detective Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) and elderly police researcher Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson) to investigate the brutal murder of a wealthy businessman named William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten). Thorn and Roth uncover clues which suggest that it is more than simply a bungled burglary.
The film, which is loosely based upon the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison, won the Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film in 1973.
That most blameless of apocalyptic menaces, overpopulation, has been with us for centuries. It compelled Jonathan Swift to write his satirical call for institutionalized cannibalism in the 18th century. And in 1973, Hollywood produced a no-less-sensational (but considerably less satirical) movie about a vastly overpopulated future, where sinister corporate types have resorted to secret, institutionalized cannibalism. Every day is a potential food riot in New York City, but every Tuesday is Soylent Green day, when the latest—and apparently tastiest—flavor of nutrient-rich, plankton-based rations is distributed. Despite that infamous (and unintentionally funny) final line, and despite Charlton Heston, this movie is a surprisingly bleak and unflinching vision of the future. And sure, I get it, the stuff is made out of people. But that revelation won't fix the desiccated environment or shrink the population to manageable levels. The world of Soylent Green is as doomed as its inhabitants are delicious.
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