FanUnity B(uzz)log

Famous for its ending, where Charlton Heston’s character Thorn defiantly shrieks a revelation about the main food product of a bleak, misogynistic future, Soylent Green captures the old ham in one of his most likable acting phases.Based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, the story unfolds in New York 2022, where half of the country’s population is homeless and jobless and a huge food-making corporation called Soylent wields a disturbing amount of political power. One of those lucky enough to have a job is the Heston’s hard-nosed detective, who lives in a dank flat with his partner, an affable old codger named Sol (Edward G. Robinson).

The conflict is set into motion when a powerful member of the Soylent company, William Simonson, is murdered in his apartment and Thorn is called on the case. Made to look like a simple break-in gone awry, our clever gumshoe gets the sense that something bigger is going on. The catch is, the government doesn’t want him to realize that. When Thorn’s superior officer, after a visit from a government official, tells our hero to drop the case, Chuck (essentially) tells him to go to hell and continues the investigation on his own. Thorn comes upon the horrible truth about Soylent company and its new food sensation, Soylent Green, after Sol decides to take advantage of the government’s euthanasia policy.

In his excellent final performance, screen legend Edward G. Robinson helps Heston take this iffy material and raise it up into a pretty entertaining film. Unfortunately, though, the movie is sabotaged by a number of factors. While Heston’s love interest, Leigh Taylor-Young, is alluring as the late Simonson’s “furniture” (beautiful women are apparently whored out by the government as part of a package deal when you rent an apartment in this future), other members of the supporting cast fail the film. The direction is very dated as well, visually the film reeks of the early ’70s (whether that’s something you like or not I’ll leave to you). Undercutting the climactic showdown at the end of the film is the film’s seemingly utter lack of a score. Music is incorporated nicely into Sol’s final scene, however.

Soylent Green has maintained a place in the cultural consciousness because of Chuck’s bloodied-fist-in-the-air final pronouncement, but in the end, the film rests well below the classic Planet of the Apes and a notch above The Omega Man when compared with Heston’s other ventures into science fiction.

2/5 Stars.