WARNING: SPOILERS

“It’s people! Soylent Green is made of people!”

Yes. Also sheets. Chuck failed to mention that. Dead bodies go down a conveyer belt draped in white sheets, get dumped into a vat of goo, and the next thing they’re the titular green slabs on another conveyer belt. So I might worry more about the sheets. At least people are organic.

“Soylent Green” came out when I was 10 but I was never drawn to it. The original poster made it seem like garbage trucks were after Charlton Heston, which isn’t exactly thrilling; and once I knew the last-act reveal, which everybody knew soon enough, why bother?

Why bother now? Because the movie is set in 2022. Yes, the future is here and it’s dystopic.

Admittedly they get a few things wrong. 

The end of Rico
For one, they imagine out-of-control population growth, with New York City stuffed to the rafters with 40 million people. Our hero, Detective Thorn (Heston), is forever stepping over the kerchiefed, slightly Sovietish masses sleeping in stairwells. Yet NYC’s current population (8.4 million) isn’t far off from what it was during filming (7.6 million). High rents help. 

Outdoor scenes were shot through a greenish filter, to emphasize the out-of-control pollution, but we’re better off than that. Women's rights? Again wrong. In their world, feminism didn't take. Women are furniture. That’s literally what they’re called—at least the young pretty ones who come with an apartment, such as Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young, hot), who becomes the Love Interest. She’s Furniture to William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotton), a member of the vaguely governmental body called “the Exchange” that runs things, but he’s killed in the first act. Thorn is the detective working the case. He’s the hero but as corrupt as anyone. Or he’s corrupt in the way those in dire straits are corrupt. He steals to survive—to get a little something-something for him and his partner, a police analyst, or “Book,” named Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), with whom he lives in a cramped apartment.

Aside: It was fun watching Robinson, who was blacklisted 20 years earlier just for being liberal, and future NRA president and GOP darling Charlton Heston acting together and seeming to enjoy each other’s company. This is Robinson’s final movie role: He died of cancer in January 1973—post-production but pre-release. He also dies, via assisted suicide, in the film—a fact that some critics had trouble with back in ’73. They shouldn’t have made him act a death scene when he was dying! Me, I’m just happy Eddie, nee Emanuel Goldenberg, got to play Jewish for once. L’chaim, kid.

What else? No masks in this 2022 world because no global pandemic. But the one portent of the future the movie got right is a good one:

Sol: How can anything survive in a climate like this? 

Sol: A heat wave all year long.

Both: A greenhouse effect.

Apparently it’s the first time climate change was used as a plot device in a film. Thank god we listened to the warning. 

“Soylent Green” isn't bad but it fails to cohere in places. Thorn is forever moaning about the state of the world without knowing what it used to be. And he's not really good at his job. Mostly he’s interested in cadging a strawberry here, smoking a cig there, schtupping Shirl everywhere. Sure, he figures out some stuff. Simonson’s death wasn’t the result of a break-in—more like an assassination—and the orders probably came from the Soylent Corp. He figures the bodyguard (Chuck Connors) was in on it, too. But it’s Sol who realizes why Simonson was offed. Simonson found out something, couldn’t live with it and was ready to talk.

Sol can't live with it, either. That’s another odd moment. Thorn gives Sol two volumes of “The Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report” from 2006 and 2015, Sol discovers their secrets (the ocean’s dying, plankton are dying, Soylent Green is people), and, with no reveal to us, he takes his findings to “the Supreme Exchange”—old people in the stacks of a library. The Exchange Leader (Celia Lovsky, one-time wife of Peter Lorre, who played T’Pau on “Star Trek”) tells him they need proof before they can present it to the Congress of Nations. So Sol goes out and gets that proof.

Kidding. He agrees to be euthanized without telling Thorn what he's learned.

That's an odd turn, right? “Hey, I have earth-shattering news! Oh, you need proof? I'm outta here.” Plus, aren't the book volumes proof enough? Or is the Exchange asking for proof knowing he won't be able to get it, Sol senses this and that's why he opts for death. Either way, Thorn arrives before Sol dies and Sol whispers the secret to him (with no reveal to us) and tells him to get proof. Yet another odd turn: Thorn thinks he gets it! He hops a ride to a plant, sees it all for himself, and at the end, wounded in a crowded church after a final fight with Chuck Connors, he tells his captain, Hatcher (Brock Peters), “You don’t understand. I got proof. They need proof. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happening.”

Yeah, that's not proof. “I’ve seen it” isn’t proof. And this guy is a detective? Maybe they should’ve sent a journalist.

Anyway that sets up our famous strident outcry at the end:

Listen to me, Hatcher. You've gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! We’ve gotta stop them! Somehow!

At which point there's a freeze frame and the camera zooms in on Thorn’s bloody hand as it points to the sky. And that’s the end. You gotta love ’70s cinema.

So much is left unanswered. Will Thorn live? Is Soylent going to kill him? Is Hatcher in on it? He stuck him on riot control duty so Simonson's assassin could have a shot at him, yet in the final shots he seems empathetic. So was he just following orders? But whose? I assume the Soylent Corp., but where are they? Who are they? We never see them. They should've shown us. Soylent Corp. is people, after all. It's people, I tell you!

You blew it up, etc.
Strident outcries in the final shot, condemning man’s inhumanity to man, were Heston's bit back then. Cf., “Planet of the Apes.” Dystopias, too. Prior to this he starred in “Omega Man,” based on the novel “I Am Legend,” in which, for much of the film, Heston thinks he’s the last man on Earth. In that one no one’s around, in this one everyone’s around. Some say fire, some say ice.

From here, Heston starred in disaster flicks (“Earthquake,” “Airport 1975”), period pieces (“Three/Four Musketeers,” “Crossed Swords”) and the final refuge of stars of his era, the western (“The Last Hard Men,” “The Mountain Men”). By the early '80s he was done as a leading man, but he'd had quite a run. Adjusted for inflation, two of his films (“The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur”) are  among the 15 biggest box-office hits in U.S. history. Yet it's the striden outcries that keep on ringing. When AFI counted down the top 100 movie quotes in Hollywood history, only two Heston lines made the cut: “Take your stinkin' paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” at 66; and “Soylent Green is people!” at 77.