As Soylent Green Gets An Upgrade, Let’s Remember What Was Missing From The Original Story
In the original story, Soylent Green was not actually people.
Released in 1973 and coming out this week in a new 4K UHD transfer on Blu-ray, Soylent Green is set in the distant (!) year of 2022, in a polluted, congested New York City bursting with 40 million inhabitants as the world teeters on the edge of ecological and societal collapse. The film stars Charlton Heston (whose brand in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was apocalypse, with films like Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man to his name) as Thorn, a detective assigned to investigate the murder of a wealthy businessman named Simonson (Joseph Cotten).
Simonson was on the board of the Soylent corporation, which produces the processed soy and plankton wafers that feed most of the world’s population. Suspecting that Simonson was assassinated, Thorn doggedly pursues the case despite being warned off it by his superiors and escaping several attempts on his own life — until he ultimately discovers the horrifying truth behind Soylent and its newest product, Soylent Green.
Directed by Richard Fleischer (Fantastic Voyage), Soylent Green was based on a 1966 science fiction novel called Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. While Harrison's book is very much a warning about overpopulation and the hoarding of dwindling resources by the 1%, the major reveal in the film — which we’ll get to in a moment — is nowhere to be found in the text. Yet Harrison's grim view of the future remains intact in this cult classic.
How Was Soylent Green Initially Received Upon Release?
The film, which was a decent hit at the time for the struggling Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, was met with a rather mixed reception from critics. Roger Ebert liked it, calling it a “good, solid science fiction movie,” although his future TV sparring partner, Gene Siskel, called it “silly” and found it laughable.
Other reviews commended the film for its vision of the future and Edward G. Robinson for his moving performance as Sol, the elderly police researcher who works with Thorn and signs up for assisted suicide when he discovers the secret of Soylent Green. Robinson passed shortly after completing the film, making his work here (Sol passes away listening to classical music and watching soaring images of unspoiled nature from a past long gone) all the more poignant, which critics at the time and in the years since have noted.
Why Is It Important to See Soylent Green Now?
Soylent Green is more than its cultural catchphrase.
“Soylent Green is made of people!” That line, delivered by a gravely wounded Heston at the end of the film, is no spoiler; it’s hardly a surprise in the movie itself and it’s become embedded in the pop culture zeitgeist. But the reveal that the "food" being produced for the poor by the Soylent Corporation is made from human remains is, as mentioned above, not part of Harry Harrison’s original novel, but was presumably added by screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg.
The latter also significantly changed the character of Sol, the nature of the murder case, and Thorn’s budding relationship with Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), who is the murder victim’s mistress in the book but in the movie is “furniture” — essentially a sexual slave (shades of The Handmaid’s Tale) — who comes with the apartment in the luxury, high-rise building that Simonson lives in.
Yet as Harrison himself remarks in author John Brosnan’s Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction, all the machinations of the plot — including the revelation about Soylent Green — are almost unimportant, both in his book (which is set in 1999) and the film. What is important is the cumulative effect of watching this dystopian, doomed world come gradually into focus: the food lines, the rationing of water, the riots when supplies run out, the squalid, small spaces in which people live and sleep, and the contrast with the lives of the wealthy and privileged, who live in spacious apartments with hot water and access to real beef and vegetables.
“The background is the foreground,” Harrison said, and he’s right. You can guess halfway through the movie what Soylent Green is made of, and while that’s still frightening — could things get that bad? — what lingers from the film is the miasma of smog that hangs over NYC, resembling the haze from the Canadian wildfires that blanketed the city just last week. Or the vast disparity between the way Simonson lives and the existence that Thorn and Sol scratch out in their one-room hovel. Or the woman lying dead on the steps outside an overcrowded church, while her toddler daughter weeps beside her. Could things get that bad? One might argue that we’re almost there already.
What New Features and Upgrades Does Soylent Green Have?
The new 4K remaster is the big draw.
Soylent Green has been released previously on laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray, with only a scant handful of features. Two vintage featurettes are ported over from the earlier releases, one a look at the making of the film and the other a tribute to Robinson. An archival commentary from Fleischer and Taylor-Young is also repurposed here, next to a new one from film historians Michael Brooke and Johnny Mains.
In addition to the new 4K transfer — an interesting challenge for a film that’s meant in several scenes to look hazy and washed out — other new features include archival interviews with Heston and Fleischer at the British Film Institute, reversible cover art, and a booklet featuring fresh writing about the movie. Free samples of Soylent Green are thankfully not included.
