Viking Night: Soylent Green
By Bruce Hall
July 21, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I didn’t even need to Google it. I can tell, because the movie crams about 30 years of back story into a slightly too long montage of still photographs meant to depict the collapse of human civilization. Pollution, depletion of natural resources, and massive overpopulation have gradually deprived the earth of its ability to sustain human life. Since there wasn't enough cash on hand to actually film any of this, you kind of have to just imagine society collapsing into war, riots, starvation and chaos. And you'll have to imagine it accompanied by a weird, jaunty soundtrack better suited to a Benny Hill sketch than an introduction to the Apocalypse. Sure, it gets the point across. But it's only the first of many compromises that gut this would-be blockbuster of substance from the moment it starts.
So for the record, it's the year 2022, and things are so bad that according to the opening scene card, 40 million people are crammed into New York City. That sounds like a lot, but I suspect a lot of them commute, making that a gross exaggeration. Still, it's enough that people sleep in stairwells, live out of dumpsters, and wander the streets looking for work. Unfortunately the best jobs available are sleeping in stairwells and living out of dumpsters. And since nobody has any money, they pay you in sadness and hunger. The government still functions, mainly in the form of a sprawling bureaucracy that assigns each citizen a number, and keeps careful track of them so they know how many people die every week. I guess it's nice to know that no matter how bad things get, the government will always have enough in the tank to tell you what to do, even when there's really nothing to do but wait to die.
There are bright spots, though. The Soylent Corporation has dominated the food industry for years, marketing imaginatively named soybean supplements to the starving masses like Soylent Red and Soylent Blue. No doubt that equals big cost savings to the Marketing team. When a third of your customers drop dead standing in line waiting for your product, you really can almost name it anything you want. So instead of pushing the envelope and going with something sexy like Soylent Pimento Loaf or Soylent Erection Lasting Longer Than Four Hours, they decide to name their new product Soylent Green. They don't even try to hide the fact that it's made from seaweed – an admittedly nutritious food that most people outside of Japan still wouldn't accept if the only other option was eating a bowl of their own hair.
Soylent Green is in short supply, though, so it's only available on Tuesdays - except when it's not. This often leads to riots, which really isn't as bad as it sounds, because riots create jobs! The “police brutality” and “collecting the dead” industries are both experiencing rapid expansion, which is good news for guys who are into heavy machinery. When people die, their bodies are literally chucked into the nack of ordinary municipal garbage trucks and shipped off to waste collection plants, because funerals are so 20th Century. And riot police (wearing what are obviously just slightly modified football helmets) get to drive dump trucks tricked out with bulldozer attachments that literally scoop dissenters off the street a dozen at a time and toss them in the back, where there doesn't seem to be anything stopping them from climbing back out again, except they never do.
It's that peculiar combination of imagination AND lack of attention to detail that makes Soylent Green such a frustrating experience. But there's more.
So much more.
In the midst of all this madness is Frank Thorn (Charlton Heston), who ekes out a living as what passes for a New York City police officer in a world where crime is so rampant even Judge Dredd would have a hard time giving a shit about it. Thorn lives in a not so bad looking tenement, cheerfully shaving with rusty razors while listening to his roommate, a retired cop named Solomon (Edward G Robinson), wax philosophical about the good old days when they had improbable places called “grocery stores,” where you could buy strange, alien things like “meat” and “strawberries.” What we SEE is two cops, the old mentor and the hotheaded young gun - and two generations of misery, dutifully exchanging stilted, expository dialogue and riding a bicycle to generate electricity.
But what we HEAR is akin to an old man bragging about the big fish he caught on his trip to Montana while his roommate rolls his eyes and waves it off. They almost make starvation look fun, which is why I have a hard time buying it. I've been chewing my nails while I write this, and that's more food than these two guys supposedly eat in a week. And yet here they are, goofing on each other like an episode of Perfect Strangers while two dozen people breathe each other's farts in the stairwell outside because they have no place else to sleep. But it's okay. I'll accept it. Fine. One is old enough to remember a better world, and the other has never known anything else and has learned to accept it.
Fine. I get it. I see what you're doing. Let's move on.
On the other side of the tracks are a very, very select few who live in the kind of opulence befitting the year 2020. They enjoy luxuries like “free time” and “air conditioning.” They inhabit spacious, luxuriously carpeted apartments. They dress every day like it's New Year's Eve and play futuristic “video games” while the vast majority of everyone else starves and dies. Not surprisingly, these people are called “lawyers.” But in this world, even the wealthy get by on wilted lettuce and furry carrots, and even the wealthy get murdered. That's how Thorn ends up investigating the death of William Simonson (Joseph Cotten) corporate counsel for Soylent Corporation.
And the hilarious thing about it is that right from the start, we know far more about the crime than Thorn does. Yet, we're forced to watch him fumble through his half ass investigation anyway. Thorn initially takes little interest in his assignment, clearly disillusioned by the need to investigate murder in a world where death is literally for dinner. Plus, he's easily distracted by the lifestyle of this former lawyer who can afford extravagances like unspoiled meat, bourbon or hot and cold running water. Thorn quickly concludes Simonson was deliberately targeted, then plunders the dead man’s home of what he can, bringing home books, booze, and a piece of meat in such modest condition it makes Sal cry.
If you take out the post-apocalyptic setting, Soylent Green is just a generic police procedural, where a hard boiled cop investigates an obviously suspicious murder that is obviously linked to an obviously shadowy corporation that's trying hard to hide one of its shadowy secrets. Nobody really appears to be starving, and the body strewn streets of New York are clearly just the MGM back lot with a few more extras around than usual. The world the movie creates is certainly bleak, and the story plays lip service to some big ideas. But when we get to the end, and the famous Soylent Green plot twist, it feels cheap and anticlimactic.
At the end of Planet of the Apes or The Sixth Sense, the movie was turned on its head; the Big Reveal forced you to look at the film from a different perspective. But the payoff came from the fact that up to that point, the story touched on some pretty significant themes. Soylent Green does no such thing - we see images of hungry people, but we don't explore what it means to be hungry in any significant way. There are lots of sooty extras, and plenty of self-aware monologues delivered by characters who clearly know they're in a movie. There's even a prostitute caste (charmingly referred to as "furniture") that exists mainly to add sex appeal to an otherwise dull story and to provide Thorn with a perfunctory love interest.
And also, sexism.
But not once does the story touch on WHY a woman would subject herself to such a thing in such a world. We see many of the by-products of starvation and deprivation, but we almost never examine the human cost, never connect with the characters or their world, and therefore feel almost nothing when Heston makes his famous declaration at the end. And even the moment itself isn't quite what it's cracked up to be. More people remember Phil Hartman's parody of it than likely remember the original line. Soylent Green is less an "end of the world" film than it is something meant to cash in on the "end of the world movie craze" that dominated the 1970s. It is essential viewing for movie buffs only; for anyone else seeking a post apocalypse/Charlton Heston fix, a better option would be The Omega Man, or of course, those damn dirty Apes.