SeeQuant
Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction
Griff Lees
Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.
Married Baby
Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?
Martin Bradley
Made in 1973 but set some 50 years in the future "Soylent Green" imagines a world so over-populated that people sleep on staircases and queue up for the food of the title, farmed out to them from food-banks. The twist in the tale and the fact that the film marked the last screen appearance of Edward G Robinson, (he died soon after completing it), has earned it a certain celebrity amongst Science Fiction films and Robinson does lend it a touch of class it would otherwise have lacked, while the film's one great sequence is built around him.The plot involves policeman Charlton Heston, at his most wooden, investigating the murder of bigwig Joseph Cotton, a major player in the Soylent Corporation. Richard Fleischer was the director so you know that at least it's going to be a very professional job of work but perhaps its reputation is unnecessarily inflated. If you know the punchline then you know everything leading up to it doesn't stand up to repeated viewings. Entertaining for what it is, though.
one-nine-eighty
A classic film with Charlton Heston taking the lead as a detective trying to uncover who murdered a corporate big wig. Set in the future where greenhouse gasses and nasty chemicals have ravaged food supplied, a massively inflated populous struggles for food and breathing room. While this film may seem dated by today's slick standards this production from the 70's is still relevant, delivering a message about culture and society, wealth, greed, economics and the lengths humans will go to in order survive. Slow at times while the plot and setting unfolds the film picks up pace towards the end. The acting is as good as you'll get from similarly dated films. There's nostalgia for anybody re watching this but equally there's fun and thrills for new audiences still. Enjoy.
jakob13
In seeing 'Soylent Green' in 2017, we are struck how immediate and contemporary it is. We are living in a time that takes history and facts in a less detached way manner than we did in the past: objectivity has, it seems, no virtue,no relevance. Harry Harrison's dystopian novel 'Make Room! Make Room! became the film 'Soylent Green', under the skillful hand of director Richard Fleischer. The film's appropriate to our times; it speaks to our condition; its themes are associated with today's moral and social and political issues. 'Soylent Green' reveals in a futuristic New York, the consequences of global warming, that America's coupon clippers deny. The film released in 1974 talks of the 'greenhouse effect', a term that has slipped out of public consciousness, yet vividly represented by Fleischer as a world of excessive temperatures, over populated, with insufficient housing, a world of the poor and hungry who live cheek to jowl even in stairwells; churches have become warehouses for the homeless and the huddled masses. The rising temperatures have rendered the earth sterile so that food production cannot sustain life, and a corporation of the rich find ways to feed the 99 percent with something called 'soylent yellow, brown and now green'. 'Soylent Green' is a morality tale; it has definite lessons for our ruling corporate classes if they would only drop the scales from this eyes, and cleans the encrusted wax in their ears. We are in a world where the 1 percent, live in luxury and the 99 percent in despair. The film has, obviously, a bearing on the way our elite make decisions only for their bottom line. Slaves exist; they are called furniture; no longer human, they serve for sexual pleasure, and can be discarded at will like an old lamp or chair that no longer serves its purposes. The film's conceit has an echo from the 18 century: Dean Jonathan Swift says it all in 'A Modest Proposal'. 'Soylent Green's' universe is one that believes in waste not want not and all that hoary dictum entails. The film follows the tried and true hard-boiled detective genre with its twists and turns; its corrupt practices, its tail of dead,its false leads and chases, the heavy hand of the powerful to quash the hero Thron played with clenched jaws (Charlton Heston's trade mark) from getting at the truth. He is ably supported by Sol Roth (played by Edward G. Robinson, in his last film role) with a turn that enables Thorn or Heston to find his way. Chuck Connors is a cool killer at the beckon and call of the corporate powers that rule this claustrophobic world. Black actors play secondary but important roles, which says something for the casting of those days when Nixon's Southern Strategy was in full swing.'Soylent Green' is a film that deserves to be review and shown in schools, on television regularly. It has cautionary lessons for us that we should learn, yet the Trump White House and his billionaire cronies are pushing our planet to the hour when life on Earth will look like the ambiance of suffering and torment of the mass of people while the sybaritic holders of power make merry and money and enjoy the fruits of power as the world goes to hell in a hand basket.
greg_bbb
I still love watching Soylent Green as it's the only movie that has the guts to examine the issue of extreme overpopulation depleting the planetary resource pool, which it will OBVIOUSLY do at some point. This was predicted long ago by Malthus, and doomsday Heston is there with Eddie Robinson in his final role, and he makes this movie a real gem. His final scene, with Orange as his favorite color, is an unforgettable moment and Heston plays brilliantly off it. Also, Brock Peters as his Police Lieutenant is very good, and was a friend of Hestons who appeared in 2 other of his movies including Major Dundee, a vastly underrated western. But with several novelties, and without too many special effects, this movie is pure sci-fi by the acting and the story, and the final sequence. LINCOLN KILPATRICK as the Priest is the other supporting Gem. The blank expression and horror at the truth he heard show clearly on his face, and is one of those unforgettable moments. But this is one of Heston's best roles, and he plays a sweating, clever cop of the future with no inkling of the beauty that was earth of the past perfectly.
