I saw Soylent Green at the theater when it first came out and watched it again last night on TCM. It hasn't held up well, and it hasn't even predicted the future. The book it was taken from was set in 1999, 15 years ago, where the world was supposed to be overpopulated, so much so that the vegetable rations the government had been giving out were eventually replaced by rations made from human remains - "Soylent Green is people". The book by Harry Harrison, which the movie is based on, came out at about the same time Paul Erlich wrote "The Population Bomb", which I actually paid money for and read myself, so overpopulation was a big time cause at the time. I even fell for it myself. And in Harrison's book, the usual environmental destruction meme comes up. Shortly after the Harrison book but before the movie "Soylent Green" came out, Nixon created the EPA, which cleaned up a LOT of the environmental problems we had at the time. Of course, the fact that we have taken care of many or our environmental problems hasn't stopped the government from growing out of control.
QUOTE=it's just me;1064480971]I saw Soylent Green at the theater when it first came out and watched it again last night on TCM. It hasn't held up well, and it hasn't even predicted the future. The book it was taken from was set in 1999, 15 years ago, where the world was supposed to be overpopulated, so much so that the vegetable rations the government had been giving out were eventually replaced by rations made from human remains - "Soylent Green is people". The book by Harry Harrison, which the movie is based on, came out at about the same time Paul Erlich wrote "The Population Bomb", which I actually paid money for and read myself, so overpopulation was a big time cause at the time. I even fell for it myself. And in Harrison's book, the usual environmental destruction meme comes up. Shortly after the Harrison book but before the movie "Soylent Green" came out, Nixon created the EPA, which cleaned up a LOT of the environmental problems we had at the time. Of course, the fact that we have taken care of many or our environmental problems hasn't stopped the government from growing out of control.[/QUOTE] Harrison was still writing good books then, and Charlton Heston remaiined a competent actor. Movies weren't Harrison's strong suit though and Heston always chewed up the scenery. Do you conservatives WANT all these Doomsday Scenarios to come true? A major part of why SF contains so many worldwide disasters is that they act as warnings and sometimes we actually HEED them, then they consequently don't happen, everyone says they were idiotic and we ignore the next one. That sort of Armageddon, it seems, actually occurs all the time
Points of clarification- Harrison's novel set in 1999 didn't have the elements of "cannibalization" that were in the film. "soylent" was Harrison's short-hand for "soy lentil"...a mass produced food. Nothing nefarious or gross. The "Make Room, Make Room" world was very unpleasant, but not in a total state of collapse. The film was set in 2022 and was strongly re-worked from the novel. Interestingly it was the FIRST mention of global warming and greenhouse gases (Which refutes the Right's claim that "Same scientists in the 70s were saying we'd have an Ice Age"). Edward G. Robinson (in his last role) talks of "eternal summer", while remembering his youth (the then present 1970s) and the former abundance. The wealthy live in guarded apartment buildings (a precursor to the gated communities) and dine on hard-to-obtain natural foods. Live-in prostitutes called "furniture" are provided to the men. The Governor's grandchildren get to play in a single Quonset-hut sized dome "park" of trees and grass. "Soylent" (supposedly a "plankton-based" synthetic food, no mention of soy or lentils) is all that is available to the poor masses. And as a murder mystery unravels....THEN we discover that the oceans are dying and that cannibalizing the corpses of the dead is all that available. Naturally, it's easy to dismiss the film....2022 is a mere 8 years away and we're not all crammed into the major cities, with farmland off-limits and guarded. Nor has climate change become overtly damaging (Yes, yes, Deniers..."it doesn't exist"...fine. Sleep well parroting the talking points Big Oil and Big Coal tell your radio hosts to tell YOU to parrot.) Overpopulation increasing starvation didn't happen....a form of "short wheat" saved India and China, along with other agricultural innovations and as Western cultures and feminism progressed, outside of the bizarre Duggars, people wern't having 4-5-6 children. So the projections of population using the 1900s as a basis couldn't hold true. The Pill nipped it in the bud. But it still has a few "warning signs" for us....environmental degradation, vast separation of wealth levels (You can talk about the "1%"...in "Soylent Green" it was more like the "0.01%"), climate change, etc. I always find the film ironic in its cast....the lead, Charlton Heston, is hero to the Right for his advocacy for the NRA and his Republican politics.....yet he stars in THREE of the most "liberal" science ficiton movies of the late 60s early 70s...."Soylent Green", "The Omega Man", and "Planet of the Apes".
