RogerBW's Blog

Soylent Green (1973) 08 September 2025

1973 science fiction, dir. Richard Fleischer, Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson: IMDb / allmovie. A routine murder investigation will lead to a terrible secret. (Spoilers for a fifty-year-old film.)

It's difficult for me to make the adjustment: in the early 1970s, Charlton Heston wasn't the joke he's been since I first became aware of him, he was an actual bankable leading man, probably most famously in The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959). In the 1960s he was one of the few working actors to stand up and support the Civil Rights movement. And his later actions… hadn't happened yet when he made this film.

He still comes over here as a bit of a thug, though the script makes it clearly deliberate. Even though we're meant to believe in him as a good cop, one of the very few who is prepared to press on with looking fpr the murderer when the political influence gets deployed to hush up the whole affair, his character still casually steals luxury goods from the crime scene. And while he clearly believes he's seducing the concubine of the murdered man (no civil rights, an amenity that goes with the apartment until a tenant gets bored with her) the power differential is so vast that I can't help seeing it as a rape of someone who isn't allowed not to pretend to enjoy it.

Mostly though this is here to show the degenerate state of the world, with food rioters scooped up (literally) in the streets and never seen again. But hey, the new plankton-based synthetic food will solve everything! (Now, of course, we know that junk food can be loaded with all the addictive flavour chemicals and people will happily eat it instead of the real thing.)

But things carry on, and there's a lot of blundering around, and finally Edward G. Robinson's last scene ever filmed is his own character's death. It does seem strangely ad-hoc; though, as the whole film does; why bring in two attendants to wheel the gurney over to the tracks for the processing chute when you could have put it on the tracks in the first place. Heston's character bursts in, insisting on talking to his dying friend before it's too late… and then spends ages not saying anything while the effects sequence runs.

Lots of spectacle, culminating in a running fight through the Hyperion Waste Water Treatment Plant. Or… not quite culminating, because our hero runs to a church and the assassin who's after him follows. And that sequence in which the assassin is picking his way through a room of sleeping strangers could have been fiercely atmospheric… if we knew the guy or cared about his success. Instead, Heston Conquers All, and runs out into the street shouting like a madman.

But it's basically all melodrama. Nobody has a solution to the problem, nobody's even trying to solve it. The Soylent Corporation who are reprocessing bodies into food (presumably for the trace minerals), and who murdered the guy who grew a conscience, are the only people trying not to bring it all down in rioting, which is what's clearly going to happen if anyone actually listens to Our Hero…

If Silent Running had too much message, this has too little: "overpopulation bad", meh, on to the next thing.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.

[Buy this at Amazon] and help support the blog. ["As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases."]

Add A Comment

Your Name
Your Email
Your Comment

Note that I will only approve comments that relate to the blog post itself, not ones that relate only to previous comments. This is to ensure that the blog remains outside the scope of the UK's Online Safety Act (2023).

Your submission will be ignored if any field is left blank, but your email address will not be displayed. Comments will be processed through markdown.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2300ad 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech base commerce battletech bayern beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime crystal cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter disaster doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 essen 2024 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror horrorm science fiction hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2021 hugo 2022 hugo 2023 hugo 2024 hugo 2025 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow openscad opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast poetry politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant review reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 typst vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1