Product Description

The is the year 2022. Overcrowding, pollution, and resource depletion have reduced society's leaders to finding food for the teeming masses. The answer is Soylent Green - an artificial nourishment whose actual ingredients are not known by the public. Thorn is the tough homicide detective who stumbles onto the secret so terrifying no one would dare believe him.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #758 in DVD
• Brand: WARNER HOME VIDEO
• Released on: 2008-03-25
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Dolby, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 97 minutes

Customer Reviews

A timeless classic!
In the year 2022, the greenhouse effect has poisoned the Earth. The world is grossly overpopulated and there are practically no natural food sources left. Vendors in the street markets sell Soylent Red and Soylent yellow (made from soybeans), but the Government controls and hands out rations of Soylent Green on Tuesdays. Supposedly made from high-energy plankton, Soylent Green is often in short supply for the high demand. People stand in food lines all day waiting for water and processed foodstuffs. Real food is unheard of.

Detective Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) lives in a tiny, seedy apartment with his "book", Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson). A "book" is like an assistant, picking and assigning cases and performing research. To reach the streets, he must step over the dozens of homeless bodies camped out on the stairs of the apartment. Sol assigns Thorn the homicide case of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotton). Simonson lives in a posh apartment complex complete with "furniture", which includes a woman. His "furniture's" name is Shirl. Shirl and Simonson's bodyguard Tab Fielding (Chuck Conners) were out shopping when the murder occurred inside the apartment. (Check out Shirl's "new" video game)

The murder is a puzzle to Thorn, who believes Simonson wasn't just murdered but assassinated. He steals two books from Simonson and has Sol research them. (He also steals real food, booze, soap, a towel, paper, and pencils - items not available to the general public) When Thorn finds out Simonson was the director of Soylent and friend to Governor Santini, his chief attempts to pull him off the case and close it. But there's too much mystery surrounding the murder, and Thorn refuses to give up until he solves the puzzle of Simonson and the secrets of Soylent.

I loved this movie in the 70's and still love it today. Even though 'Soylent Green' was made in 1973, it's a rare movie that has aged well, and holds up it's integrity even today in 2008. It's sort of a 70's version of cyberpunk. There's pathetic poverty, dry empty landscapes, unbearable heat, long food lines, processing plants of heavy machine complexes, the loss of personal identity, and hollow, garbage-strewn city streets and alleys. Even the soundtrack aged well, and was quite futuristic in 1973. 'Soylent Green' has always been a favorite of mine, and if you've managed to go this long without seeing it, then it's time to pick up your copy and treat yourself. Those fans like me will want to pick up the DVD to add to your collection. Definitely worth a purchase! Enjoy!

Solid
In terms of the arts, the 1970s were a very turbulent era. In literature and the visual arts, it was the closing of a great fifty or sixty year period of creativity that has yet to be restarted. In music it was a decade that many see as a low point, due to corporate rock and disco. On television it was a Golden Age for situation comedies, from The Odd Couple to the Mary Tyler Moore Show to M*A*S*H to All In The Family, but in film it was even a greater period of creativity, in all genres, that saw the rise of the American auteur- directors like Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese- from the ashes of the old studio systems that had dominated Hollywood for over half a century. These directors wanted to craft literate, arts films for the masses, of the sort that had been staples in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Yet, the studios were trying to keep pace, with socially aware films of the sort not seen since the 1930s.
But, unlike the films of the 1930s, starring actors like Jimmy Cagney and John Garfield (usually co-starring the Dead End Kids), that dealt with social issues in a gritty realistic way, or as realistic as one could get on a sound stage, the social consciousness of the late 1960s and early 1970s manifested itself most in science fiction films, which allowed the Left Wing of Hollywood to preach to the masses under the guise of what most considered little above comic strip entertainment. There was precedent for this approach, for several of the flying saucer films of the 1950s dealt with the political zeitgeist of the McCarthy era- most notably The Day The Earth Stood Still and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. And the early 1960s saw Rod Serling constantly subverting the political conservatism of the time by casting social issues into science fiction settings on his classic sci fi television anthology show The Twilight Zone. Among the studio offerings of this time were the ecologically sensitive Silent Running; George Lucas's first film THX 1138, which dealt with consumerism, group think, and existentialism; and Logan's Run, which hammered away at Communism and state control versus the rights of an individual.
Some of the film's references are quite heavyhanded- and reek of the then current Arab oil crisis and rampant inflation. A few jarred strawberries cost $150, and Soylent rations its assorted colored foods- Soylent Yellow, Soylent Red, and the new Soylent Green, reputedly made from `the finest undersea growth,' in a manner not unlike the gas rationing of the time. Scenes of food riots are eerie echoes of the oil riots at many gas stations during the year of the film's release, and the scenes of crowding, and bodies, live and dead, lying all about are still chilling, as well as influential. A later film like Escape From New York is an obvious progeny. The rest of the script, by Stanley R. Greenberg, however, is rather pedestrian, and fairly standard for a dystopian flick, but Fleischer and cinematographer Richard H. Kline do a great job of filling the screen with interesting images and sounds, to spice things up. The use of soft, dimly lit visuals, murkily filtered, add a Stygian feel to the New York of the film, almost like a colorized version of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr. The only light in the film comes from artificial sources, and were it not for the fashion faux pas the film could truly seem timeless.
The end of the film, where Thorn sneaks into the processing plant where human corpses are made into Soylent Green wafers, is both chilling, and oddly drama-less. In the end, the Soylent minions hunt Thorn down, but he survives long enough to utter the film's catchphrase to Chief Hatcher. Yet, one does not know if it is enough, for Hatcher has already been co-opted, and has a track record of taking the easy way out. Yet, that fact, and its ambiguity, shows that the film does not recapitulate its characters' dilemmas, and has a depth many later, better made films, sci fi or not, do not have. It is also why Soylent Green is still a film worth watching.

Solid thriller set in a nightmare future
Terrific movie that manages to both be a `message movie' and still be entertaining. I wish modern sci-fi movies would look back to Soylent Green to see that sci-fi doesn't have to be dumb to be entertaining.

Overpopulation is rampant. The ecology has been destroyed and the Earth is barely able to sustain the multiple billions of people living. A company called Soylent is responsible for feeding half of the planet, manufacturing food from soy beans and algae from the oceans.

A top level executive with Soylent is murdered. All the evidence points to a random burglary gone wrong. Charleton Heston is the harried cop assigned to the case. The further he digs the more his superiors try to pull him off the case. What's going on and how does it relate to Soylent's newest foodstuff: Soylent Green?

The concerns that this movie (and the original book Make Room! Make Room!) is based on, namely a book called The Population Bomb, has failed to come to pass, but the movie is still worth watching anyway. The realization of a hot grungy future with heat waves that can last a year or longer and not enough space for the vast numbers of people is brilliantly realized. Everyone except for the super-rich is sweaty and grimy. Dust fills the air. Riots are so out of control, dump trucks have to be called in for crowd control. The cops (including our hero) are all corrupt to varying degrees, yet you can see why they would be. There's just not enough to go around and everyone has to fight for whatever scraps they can get. The lack of computers and internet doesn't date this movie as care is taken to show there is barely enough power to keep the lights running.

The mystery is teased out very well. Even if you already know the ultra famous end to the movie, it is still entertaining to see how they get there and to see the world that has been created.