Comprised exclusively of stills, it manages to convey the dizzying pace of development and its often unnoticed effects. The montage quickly accelerates from its proto-Ken Burns Effect zooms and pulls to a frenzied barrage of cuts and dissolves with some nifty split screen effects that could not have been simple to produce at the time. Beginning with sepia images of early American settlers, the montage unwittingly apportions blame correctly to the white settler colonists for the maddening pace of industrialization and the demise of any balanced and respectful relationship with the lived environment. What remains high on the list of concerns is the question of food, namely how to feed a planet full of people when the climate has become unpredictable and many industrial solutions developed over centuries of imperialist and capitalist exploitation (monocropping, overcoming ‘seasonality’ with complex global supply chains) are responsible for straining the planetary resources even further.Ĭharles Braverman’s two and a half minute documentary montage that opens the film is a revelation in and of itself and worthy of sustained analysis. It is a crisis that resonates powerfully today, when the incipient destruction of an habitable atmosphere has become the world’s main focus. In the film, the main crisis that drives the plot is overpopulation leading to significant food shortages. The idea that corporations will stop at nothing to maintain their profits may not have been unknown in 1973, but it surely hadn’t been instantiated as thoroughly as it has since the fall in 1988–1991 of the other counterbalancing superpower and its anti-capitalist forces. What none of the critics writing in 1973 could have foreseen, however, is the near prophetic view of the absolute callousness of late capitalism wherein profit and the enrichment of the few reign supreme. (In reality, he died barely a week after shooting wrapped.) Some critics remarked upon the entertainment value of the film and one critic, Penelope Gilliatt of the New Yorker, expressed outright exasperation with regard to the passivity of both the women and the poor depicted by the film, with which I can only heartily agree. It was received with mixed reviews upon release, with critics mostly noting that Heston’s acting had improved (a fact to which I was insensible) or the powerful effect of watching Edward G. Soylent Green didn’t become a cult favorite for nothing. But this film should not be dismissed as a flop or even as low-brow ‘trash.’ The orange-hued ketchup blood and the souped-up garbage trucks, outfitted with fearsome long-toothed front hoes, give away the film’s tight budget, as does the extremely low-tech futurism. Robinson as his aging sidekick, Sol Roth, in the final role of his career), the special effects alone signal a B-grade movie. Despite some A-list actors (Charlton Heston in the lead role of Thorn, an illiterate and corrupt cop with a heart of gold, and Edward G. Soylent Green never hit as big as some other sci-fi films of the era like 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) or Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and perhaps for good reason. In fact, I would argue that The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up pale in comparison to Soylent Green in terms of urgency and clarity of their message. While those films have been largely forgotten, the more recent ones have been received with great fanfare, especially The Day After Tomorrow, which has been credited with helping change perceptions about climate change, especially in the US. (Michael Campus, 1972)-that centered overpopulation, a problematic emphasis that has been critiqued by feminists and anti-racists since that time. In fact, Soylent Green is one of two films released 50 years ago-the other was Z.P.G. The uncanny (un)timeliness of the film is profoundly disturbing while at the same time deeply gratifying, as if hearing a voice from the past tell you that your daily anxiety about capitalism-induced climate chaos is not only well justified, it has actually been anticipated for some time.Īs Hollywood attempts, in its way, to take on the climate crisis, with films like The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004) or the more recent Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021), one tends to forget that it is a long-popular theme. While the film inevitably gets many things wrong, it also gets something dead right. Soylent Green (1973), the cult classic starring Charlton Heston, is set in what was then the distant future: the year 2022.
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