Soylent Green (1973)

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Some movies have been referenced so many times that you can pretty much piece together the whole thing without having watched it. Soylent Green is one of those movies, the twist has been ruined for almost everyone, think The Empire Strikes Back. I never had a big drive to watch this movie, but I put it on out of curiosity.

Soylent Green takes place in the future, where food is scarce and the world is overpopulated. There is a company that makes food pieces called Soylent. There are numerous colors, blue, red, yellow and the popular green. Charleton Heston plays Detective Thorn whom is investigating the murder of a wealthy board member of the Soylent Company. It his here where he stumbles across the gruesome truth behind the popular Soylent Green.

The acting is pretty solid, I mean it’s Charleton Heston he’s good in everything from The Tend Commandments to Wayne’s World 2. Chuck Connors is a nice addition, I love Chuck Connors, he was genuinely frightening in Tourist Trap (watch that). The legend Edward G Robinson plays Heston’s friend Solomon Roth, a very intelligent former college professor. My only issue with the movie is that it is slow, very slow for a movie that is 97 minutes long. It really drags in parts and the build up is all for the heart sinking ending, which itself is good, but watching it with 2023 eyes makes it seem dated.

There aren’t a lot of kills or special effects in this movie. It relies heavily on tension and the slow burn pacing, which has come back due to A24 and films like Midsommar & Hereditary. If you are into that kind of stuff, you might enjoy this more. I really had a difficult time with this, my mind wandered a lot. The slow burn was a little too slow for me. I knew the shock ending so I didn’t have that to look forward to. Soylent Green is made form people, that’s how they recycle the large population and solve the hunger issue. Getting two birds stoned at once right? Anyway, this is a classic and probably deserves a better grade than I can give it personally, I went with a C+.