BEFORE: Another futuristic film made in the past - this one was made in 1973, and set in the year 2022, when the population of New York City will hit 40 million (!) I passed on this one during last year's post-apocalyptic films, because I figured I'd be doing a Charlton Heston grouping. But then I watched "Earthquake", "Airport '75" and "The Omega Man" separately, and this film was left hanging...
THE PLOT: In an overpopulated futuristic Earth, a New York police detective finds himself marked for murder by government agents when he gets too close to a bizarre state secret involving the origins of a revolutionary new foodstuff.
AFTER: You can definitely tell that a futuristic movie reflects the worldview of the year in which it was made - here the filmmakers predicted the greenhouse effect, a global food shortage, and an impossibly over-crowded NYC. OK, I'll give them 2 out of 3, since global warming is a hot topic these days, and news reports are predicting that man will over-fish the oceans, eating whatever sea life isn't contaminated by oil spills.
In essence, NYC is portrayed here as a hot, crowded disaster zone (who says it isn't that now?) where water and synthetic food are rationed out - thankfully, Soylent Corp. makes three delicious flavors (colors?) called Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow and Soylent Green (Tuesday is Green Day - is that where the band got their name?) As you can tell by the name, Soylent Green is a delicious mix of soy, and plankton. Yeah, that's right, "plankton"...there's still plenty of delicious plankton in the oceans, right?
While basic supplies seems to be running out, there's still plenty of graft and corruption - police are allowed to confiscate "evidence" like food items and furniture while investigating crimes. Charlton Heston plays Thorn, a cop on a murder case, and the victim is an executive at the company that invented the synthetic food - so Thorn follows a trail of corruption (other than his own...) that leads him to learn about the secret ingredient. Of course, the secret ingredient is the theme on which our chefs will offer their succulent variations...
The movie did sort of predict the "right to die" movement that was championed by Dr. Jack Kevorkian earlier this decade - the elderly in this bleak future are encouraged to choose the time of their own deaths, and visit a clean, air-conditioned dying center where they're shown a wide-screen film of nature scenes, with beautiful music, so their last moments will be peaceful ones. Or perhaps the movie is so bad, they just lose the will to live - a feeling I know all too well, after last night's film.
Quibble #1 - the scientists in the future can invent a synthetic food, but they can't seem to make an effective birth control? After years of over-population, wouldn't the government institute some kind of limit on children, like the notorious policy in China?
Quibble #2 - in an overpopulated world where resources are scarce, wouldn't people start dying off in larger numbers, or lack the nutrition to have so many healthy kids? In essence, wouldn't the overpopulation problem start to take care of itself?
Quibble #3 - with all the people who work at the Soylent Green factory, wouldn't rumors ever leak out about how it's made?
Also starring Chuck Connors, Brock Peters, Joseph Cotten and Edward G. Robinson (Heston's co-star in "The Ten Commandments" - nice!)
RATING: 4 out of 10 dump trucks (maybe it's a 6 if you don't know the ending in advance)
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