Soylent Green: The Dystopia Everyone Quotes

Some films are famous for a line the way a person can be famous for a single embarrassing photograph. Soylent Green has been reduced, over fifty years, to four shouted words that escaped the movie and entered the language, repeated as a punchline by millions who have never sat through the ninety-seven minutes that earn them. That is a shame, because the film around the line is stranger, slower and sadder than its reputation as a schlocky twist-ending picture suggests. Richard Fleischer, revisiting science fiction seven years after the miniaturised marvels of Fantastic Voyage, made a genuinely oppressive vision of the future here, and the twist everyone quotes is the least interesting thing in it.

The setting is New York City in 2022, a date the film chose as a distant warning and which the calendar has since sailed past. Forty million people are crammed into a metropolis built for a fraction of that number. The greenhouse effect has cooked the planet into a permanent, filthy heatwave. Real food, an egg, a piece of beef, a strawberry, is an unimaginable luxury hoarded by the rich, and the masses survive on processed wafers manufactured by the Soylent Corporation, the newest and most nutritious of which is a green tile everybody eats and nobody understands. Charlton Heston is Detective Thorn, investigating the murder of a Soylent board member, and the investigation is the thread that pulls the whole rotten tapestry loose.

The world before the twist

What makes Soylent Green worth defending is its world-building, which is far more disciplined than the film’s camp reputation allows. Fleischer and his team render overpopulation as texture rather than spectacle, the grinding daily reality of too many bodies in too little space. People sleep in their thousands on stairwells and in the shells of dead cars. Riots are managed by “scoops”, bulldozers with hoppers that literally shovel surplus humans off the streets, and the image of people being scooped like refuse is more disturbing than any monster. Women come with the furniture in the better apartments, listed as amenities and called, with the film’s characteristic bleak wit, exactly that.

The craft lesson is in the contrast the film builds around Thorn’s investigation. When he enters the murdered man’s luxury flat, the film slows and drinks in the impossible riches, running water, air conditioning, soap, a bed, and Heston plays Thorn touching these things with the wonder of a man handling relics. That single sequence does more world-building than pages of exposition. We understand the entire economy of this future from watching a hard-bitten cop marvel at hot water. It is showing rather than telling, and it is the film at its best.

Fleischer directs the whole picture in a haze, and it is a deliberate one. The film is shot through a permanent brownish-green smog, the light thick and diffuse, the air visibly hot, so that even interior scenes feel airless and sticky. Cinematographer Richard Kline keeps the palette sickly, and the effect is to make the audience feel the climate the dialogue describes. You are never allowed to forget that this is a cooked world. That commitment to a single oppressive atmosphere, sustained for the full running time, is a large part of why the film lingers longer than its plot mechanics deserve. The heat is a character, and it never leaves the frame.

Heston is doing sturdier work here than his reputation as a stiff often credits. Thorn is a corrupt, exhausted, casually brutal man, a product of his rotten world rather than a hero standing above it, and Heston lets the character be small and tired. The film sits at the centre of his early-1970s run of science-fiction dystopias, between the ape-ruled future of Planet of the Apes and the last-man plague of The Omega Man, and of the three this is the one where his physical certainty is most usefully undercut by despair.

Sol Roth and the film’s real heart

The performance that lifts Soylent Green out of pulp belongs to Edward G. Robinson, in the final role of a fifty-year career. Robinson plays Sol Roth, Thorn’s elderly flatmate and “book”, one of the old men who remember the world before it died and who serve the illiterate young as living libraries. Sol remembers meat and greenery and clean air, and his grief for a vanished Earth is the emotional spine the plot hangs on. Robinson, who was dying of cancer during production and knew it, and who passed away twelve days after filming wrapped, brought a valedictory weight to the part that no amount of writing could have manufactured. He is mourning a world, and he was also saying goodbye.

That knowledge transforms Sol’s great scene, and it is worth flagging that this is where the film’s power actually lives, some distance from the shouted line it is remembered for. Robinson’s presence turns a modest dystopia into something close to an elegy, and the friendship between the weary cop and the grieving old man is the truest thing on screen. Fleischer, a professional’s professional, had the sense to slow down and let his dying star carry the picture’s soul.

Heston reportedly wept for real in the scene, aware of what his co-star was facing, and the two actors’ long friendship bleeds into the fiction. The result is a rare thing in dystopian cinema, a moment where the genre’s usual coldness gives way to open, unguarded feeling. It grounds the whole film’s argument in a single relationship, so that the abstract horror of a starving planet is finally felt through the loss of one particular old man who remembered when the world was green.

The real ancestor and the descendants

Soylent Green is a keystone of a specific dystopian mode, the 1970s ecological-collapse film, where the disaster arrives as the slow suffocation of a planet used up by its own inhabitants rather than a nuclear or alien one. It was adapted, loosely, from Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, which focused on overpopulation and resource scarcity and, notably, contained none of the film’s infamous revelation. Screenwriter Stanley Greenberg supplied the twist that made the movie immortal and, arguably, obscured the book’s subtler warning.

Trace its influence forward and the lineage is rich. The scooped, surplus, managed populations of Soylent Green run straight to the sealed-carriage class war of Snowpiercer, where the poor are literally fed a mysterious protein block by their masters, a debt Bong Joon-ho’s film pays with interest. Its vision of a future where new life has become the scarcest resource anticipates the sterile, dying-out world of Children of Men, another film that measures a civilisation by what it has run out of. And its quieter theme, a future that sorts human worth by biological utility, points toward the genetic caste system of Gattaca. Set beside its own sibling of 1973, Crichton’s Westworld, it completes a portrait of that year’s science fiction as uniformly convinced that the systems we build to serve us are quietly turning on us.

Spoilers below

Thorn’s investigation into the murder of the Soylent executive Simonson uncovers a cover-up that reaches into the corporation and the city government, and the deeper he digs the more people try to kill him for it. Simonson, it emerges, had learned something about the company’s flagship product that broke him, a guilty knowledge that got him killed to keep it quiet. The machinery of the plot is standard conspiracy-thriller stuff, competently turned, and it exists mainly to deliver Thorn to the truth.

The film’s devastating middle passage is Sol’s decision to die. Having confirmed the secret Simonson died for, unable to live with it, Sol goes to a government euthanasia clinic, a serene facility where the willing are given a peaceful death. There he is shown, for twenty minutes, a wraparound film of the Earth as it was, oceans and forests and flowers and open sky, set to classical music he chooses himself, and he weeps at the beauty of a planet the young in the audience have never seen. It is the film’s finest sequence and its most genuinely moving, Robinson gazing at a lost world in what he knew was his own last performance, and it lands with a force the famous twist cannot match.

That twist arrives when Thorn, following Sol’s body from the clinic, tracks the corpses to a Soylent processing plant and understands what the green wafers are made of. Overpopulation has met food scarcity and produced the only industrial solution a collapsing world would reach for: the dead, recycled into the food of the living, the crowd consuming itself. Thorn, wounded and hauled away by the crowd, shouts the truth he has discovered as he is carried off, a warning to a mass of people who cannot hear him and would not believe him if they could. The film ends on his bloodied hand raised above the throng, the knowledge already lost in the noise.

The verdict on a revisit is that Soylent Green is a better film than its punchline, a grim, tactile, unexpectedly tender dystopia whose world-building and central friendship outlast its famous shock. The twist is the hook that keeps it in the culture, but the reason to actually watch it is Edward G. Robinson looking at a screen full of a dead Earth and saying farewell to two things at once. Watch it, then follow the collapse to Children of Men for a future that runs out of the future itself, and Snowpiercer for where the protein-block dystopia goes when class war climbs aboard.