YOM Blog Review: Soylent Green

Watching a movie can be tough when you already know the ending, especially when it can be easily discovered by taking a look at just about any list of all-time famous movie quotes.

Soylent Green places Charlton Heston's hardboiled Detective Thorn in New York City in 2022. However, the movie's view of the future isn't quite flying cars and robot servants. Instead, Thorn faces a dystopic, overcrowded world where homeless people sleep in piles on stairs and make it nearly impossible to walk down the street. Due to the overpopulation and very limited resources, people survive on very small food rations of processed food - the newest and most popular one called Soylent Green.

Thorn is thrown into a murder case after wealthy businessman William Simonson, played by Joseph Cotten, one of my favorite classic movie actors, is killed. In his brief screentime, Cotten shows great humanity as the aging, morally torn businessman, who willingly surrenders his life at the hands of a bounty hunter. Cotten's muted performance is trumped only by Edward G. Robinson's portrayal (his last, in fact) of Thorn's elderly roommate Sol.

Robinson's character is very important because he represents for Thorn a living bridge to understanding how humanity used to be, or the state of humanity when audiences first saw this movie. Sol understands texts, helping Thorn solve his cases by simply reading books and analyzing texts, a "skill" that is implied to have gone by the wayside by 2022. It is Sol that supplies the intelligence and emotional drive of the movie. By, once again, simply reading a text, Sol is the one who figures out that the plankton supposedly used to make Soylent Green no longer grows; instead the food is processed from dead bodies, the big twist of the movie and the big statement made about what can happen to society if we aren't economical with our resources.

When Sol chooses to undergo assisted suicide at the end, he does it for two major reasons: to escape from the dregs of society and, essentially, to provide food for more people. This scene is both beautiful and, deep down, extremely depressing. In this depiction of society, older citizens undergo assisted suicide by taking some pills before viewing images and listening to music of their choice. As Thorn watches the scene from the other side of the glass, we see images of flowers, deer and an Earth that is beautiful, harkening back to a time when the world wasn't terrible. However, the visuals serve as just a temporary Band-Aid to briefly erase the imagery of the now-downtrodden world.

You don't have to look up the movie's IMDb page to know that this film was made in the 1970s (1973, to be exact). Although the story takes place in 2022, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of imagination applied to how the world might look then. Instead, the hairstyles, the clothing and environment look like they haven't escaped the '70s. If somebody misses the exposition in the beginning, he or she might assume the society portrayed is a reimagined version of the '70s.

Interest to Young Fans

The most obvious draw of this movie is the famous last line "Soylent Green is people," screamed by a wounded Thorn after he sees the bodies of Sol and others manufactured into the food. Having only heard the line quoted by others, I was taken aback when I finally saw it onscreen. I had always imagined the line was said as a form of surprised revelation; instead, it is uttered in crazed, close-to-breathless screams. Frankly, even knowing how the movie ends, it's still shocking.


Soylent Green takes a very interesting (read: degrading) view of woman's role in society. In the movie, women are treated like furniture; in fact, they are called furniture. All of the major female characters introduced in the movie are furniture, meaning they come with the residence they live in, serving as mistress, maid and any other role the man desires.

Other than that, this movie might not necessarily have a huge youth draw, although the movie has Charlton Heston, whose name is probably the only mainstream one in the movie that young non-classic-movie-watchers might recognize.