Soylent Green (1973)
Starring: Charlton Heston, Edward G Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, Paula Kelly
Directed by: Richard Fleischer
Rating: 
The year is 2022, and the earth is dying. On Manhattan Island (population 40 million – over double what it currently stands at) people are packed together like cattle, inhabiting any available inch of space, hungry, dirty and restless, surviving on ersatz food substitutes produced by the mysterious mega-monopoly, the Soylent Corporation.
When rough and ready cop Thorn (Charlton Heston) is called out to investigate the death of one of the corporation's directors, he quickly determines that the man has been assassinated. But why? Could it be because he's just confessed his sins to a priest? Just how terrible must those sins be?
Well, pretty terrible. But if you're not entirely sure what the secret of Soylent Green is, you won't hear it from me. Although, to be honest, it's not hard to guess: it's the same kind of hideously extended logic that has been the mainstay of population saturation satire and sci-fi from Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal to cult TV series Utopia.
The film's grimy, sweaty, smog-filled vision of the future is certainly depressing (as is the thought that in 2022 we'll all be dressing like it's 1973), a dog eat dog (or worse) world stripped of all the high tech accoutrements and plush creature comforts we all take for granted. But, forty years on, does Soylent Green still pack a punch?
Yes it does, thanks, in part to a committed performance from Charlton Heston and a moving farewell for screen great Edward G Robinson, who died shortly after the film was made. But the film also retains it power because, nine years before the action is set to take place, none of the problems depicted have been solved: we're still raping the earth to feed an ever-burgeoning population, depleting natural resources and poisoning the air and sea; making the story seem all the more prescient, and the fear that, as the credits roll, Thorn's desperate cry will go unheard, hushed up by the powers that be, increasingly likely.
So what is Soylent Green? It's a landmark dystopian movie that stands the test of time, that's what, a key influence on genre movies to this day, from Children of Men to Antiviral, that I feel lucky to have savoured the experience on the big screen.