Soylent Green (1973)
Screen: 'Soylent Green'
New Yorkers certainly have problems these days—graffiti, income tax, the Yankees — but nothing like the horrors due in 2022 as depicted in "Soylent Green," which arrived at local theaters yesterday. To begin with, the Gotham of 2022 teems with 40-million citizens; overpopulation and its concomitant horrors aside, the erosion of the environment is such that there's little to eat other than "Soylent Green" which, we're told, is synthesized from plankton. Unfortunately, the script, direction and the principals involved in this struggle for survival often are as synthetic as "Soylent Green."
There is, of course, every reason to view the next century with some fear. But "Soylent Green" projects essentially simple, muscular melodrama a good deal more effectively than it does the potential of man's seemingly witless destruction of the earth's resources.
Charlton Heston, as a harried detective investigating the murder of Joseph Cotten, a bigwig in the dictatorial Soylent Company (whom we see only fleetingly), is aided by the late Edward G. Robinson in his last role as an aged, wise, suspicious researcher, who remembers the good old days of steaks and the like. And, finally exposed by a bewildering succession of hungry citizens, overcrowded streets, fancy pads and the resident, luscious lasses (called "furniture" here) of the rich few, is the awful truth about the secret ingredient of "Soylent Green."
We won't reveal that ingredient but it must be noted that Richard Fleischer's direction stresses action, not nuances of meaning or characterization. Mr. Robinson is pitiably natural as the realistic, sensitive oldster facing the futility of living in dying surroundings. But Mr. Heston is simply a rough cop chasing standard bad guys.
Their 21st-century New York occasionally is frightening but it is rarely convincingly real.