Soylent Green

Soylent Green is perhaps the most early 70s movie of all time. Set in the dark far off future of 2022, the film is a documentary about life in a Warhammer 40k hive city, cautionary tale of overpopulation and societal breakdown as well as a grand mystery. The problem looking back on it in hindsight is that everyone now knows the big twist about what the titular food is made out of (human corpses). But there’s more to it than just that.

See, the movie is very early 1970s in that the characters dress and talk so similarly that sometimes I had trouble telling them apart. But it also takes the most ridiculous set pieces and expects the viewer to treat them with utmost somber seriousness-and I don’t just mean “ridiculous” as in later shown to be inaccurate ie the prison Manhattan in “1999” in Escape from New York. It shows a wildlife sanctuary consisting of one tree in a greenhouse bubble and a long scene where rioters are literally scooped up in bulldozers and expects both to be serious.

The movie isn’t badly made and you could do a lot worse than watching it. But it is ridiculously dated and belongs to the pretentious pre-Star Wars school of 1970s sci-fi.