Soylet Green is What?

"It's the year 2022... People are still the same. They'll do anything to get what they need. And they need SOYLENT GREEN."

Wow, Soylent Green, what can I say? I watched it over the weekend and it was ... interesting.

The basic premise is it's 2022 and there's apparently been a population explosion and Global Warming has come to fruition, causing fresh food, electricity, and housing to become hot commodities. One day, an old rich man is murdered and a cop, played by Charlton Heston, takes it upon himself to solve this murder case, while also stealing the rich man's food and having sex and taking endless showers with his woman. Pretty soon he learns some disturbing details surrounding the case and flips out and gets shot. The End.

Where does the Soylent Green come in, you ask? Good question. It's literally only mentioned about three times in the entire movie. This was surprising to me, given the name of the film. The focus of the movie is on this murder case and, almost more than that, on the many strange goings-on of the future. While some of these predictions are interesting, they do not make for a very creepy movie, and the ending feels somewhat anti-climactic since we haven't really gotten a feel for the prominence of Soylent Green. If I hadn't read that tagline at the beginning, I don't think I would have even known that Soylent Green was a very big deal.

Probably the most fun part was seeing what these filmmakers thought the world would be like in 50 years, only 13 years from now!

Some highlights:

• Global Warming sets in, causing problems for our crops and animals. The solution: heavily processed food using whatever edible, living things there are, such as soybeans and kelp.


• Apparently in the future, sexy women will come with swanky apartments, literally as part of the furniture, which is what we will call them. "Furniture"


• The population of New York City will grow to 40 million (about 5 times what it is now. Better start having more kids!), and anyone who's not wealthy will be lucky to get an apartment and may resort to sleeping in stair wells.


• As a result of this population explosion, riots are frequent and "riot control"
  consists of large dump trucks that scoop people up in the front and dump them into the back of the truck. I think the scene depicting that was supposed to be creepy, but it wasn't.

So is it worth watching? Eh, if you like Charlton Heston and/or sci fi movies, probably. I'm glad I watched it, but it's probably not something I need to see again and it definitely didn't weird me out as much as anticipated. But you may not want to take my word for it ... I don't have the best history with sci fi movies.