CineBad!!!

It’s the year 2022 and the population of New York is 40 million people! People are forced to do things like sleep on staircases and eat little freeze-dried wafers of food made by the Soylent corporation. Soylent comes in three flavors: Red, Yellow, and Green, but Green is what people like best and are willing to riot over. After all, Tuesday is Soylent Green Day!

OK, so, Charlton Heston plays this cop, Thorn, who’s kind of a jerk and goes around beating people up and sleeping with their furniture (oh, yeah, in the future, women are considered part of the “furniture” that comes with an apartment. I won’t get into the feminist implications of that right now, except to say that the women in this film are all really dorky and act really wimpy and sheeplike, and for a while I wasn’t sure if they were real women or some sort of docile robotic substitute, a Stepford Furniture kind of thing.) He gets sent to investigate the murder of some rich dude named Simonson, who was apparently killed by a burglar.

Thorn starts to suspect that this was really an assassination, and in the process of his investigations, discovers that Simonson really worked for the Soylent corporation. Then, for the next hour or so, everyone runs around whispering about some terrible secret that the Soylent corporation keeps, a secret so awful that people who learn it go insane and / or lose the will to live! So we watch a lot of people either go insane or die. There’s the local priest, who took Simonson’s confession just before his death, who gets to make a lot of cryptic remarks like, “Generally, I allot space to those who need it. Are you in need of space?” and Thorn’s roommate, Sol, who learns the Soylent Secret and then packs off “home,” home being a place where you can voluntarily be euthanized. Thorn follows Sol and tries to stop him, but he can only look helplessly as Sol’s shown some stock footage of beautiful nature things that don’t exist in the year 2022. Sol tries to tell Thorn the Awful Secret, but expires dramatically instead. (See?)

So now Thorn must infiltrate the Soylent factory and expose their dirty little secret! Will he make it in time, or will he be assassinated by the guy who looks like John Denver? I won’t spoil the secret by telling you what the Soylent corp’s up to, but if you’re one of the three or four people on Earth who’s never heard about this movie, it’s uhm, shocking.

OK, I’ll admit that I actually started to like the movie for real here and there, especially during Sol’s death scene. It was weird– Sol’s existence in this film wasn’t even explained, really– he was just some old crabby dude who lived with Thorn. They weren’t even obviously related or anything. Sol’s main function was to sit around and bitch about how good things were in the Good Old Days (now.) But nonetheless, I got kind of choked up when Sol croaked. Maybe it was because the film’s hokeyness kind of worked to its advantage– like I said, Sol goes to this place, drinks some poison, and watches films of how beautiful the Earth used to be. But the films are really lame and the color is bad, which is what they probably would be like, in real life, so the scene was simultaneously kind of pathetic, sad, and truthful. Except that, pretty much, the rest of the movie is filmed that way, too.

Ed: I since found out that Sol was a “book,” someone who does research for cops, since in the future few people are still able to read. Somehow I missed all of this when I watched the movie.

Anyway, this film was hard to rate. Overall it was pretty cheesy, but it was really boring in places, and then I started to like it at the end. So you’ll just have to make up your own mind about Soylent Green. The screenplay was by Stanley Greenberg, if that helps you decide. And it was based on a novel by Harry Harrison. And it stars Dick Van Patten as Usher #1. So now you have every reason to go out and rent Soylent Green.