Yeah, maybe a sci-fi thriller from the 70s isn’t entirely on theme for a Halloween watchlist, but the eventual twist is horrifying enough to justify it. After all, the dystopia of Soylent Green is multilayered and disturbing in many ways!
As with The Others yesterday, I went into Soylent Green knowing its plot twist and nothing else. While it might’ve been better to go in blind, the ending becomes more and more apparent as the movie progresses. So I was free to enjoy the worldbuilding without trying to guess at the twist. Although “enjoy” is a strong word. We’ll get to that.
You know how the second Back to the Future imagined we’d have flying cars and no need for roads by 2015? Well, Soylent Green severely on-upped them! This movie gave us a dystopic future with poisoned oceans, severe food shortages, and crowd control via massive human bulldozers – all by the year of our Lord 2022! So by Soylent Green standards, we’re doing excellently!
(It’s a nice antithesis to the usual sci-fi futuristic fantasies, with humans discovering space travel and alien cultures by the 2000s! Soylent Green really expected the worst of us.)
This movie is something of a “rogue badass cop” flick in a different environment. Our MC, Thorn, has a surprisingly sweet relationship with Sol, the old man who lives with him and provides police research. The wholesomeness of two men unashamedly telling each other “I love you” is delightfully refreshing, and this comes during an emotionally strong final scene.
But that’s as far as “wholesome” goes here. In this world, the only women we see are called “furniture” and treated as literal objects, bound to certain apartments and offering men sexual favors the way you might offer a guest a glass of water. So forget all the Soylent stuff, I’d rather see a movie about one of these women taking up a revolution!
Let’s get back to the aforementioned Soylent stuff. Since I knew where the ending was going, I was eagerly waiting for it… and then I kept waiting. I repeatedly checked the time stamp as the movie neared its close, wondering how long it would take for that final twist.
In the original Planet of the Apes, the twist comes right at the movie’s end. It works perfectly because of the timing. Its futility and doomed nature lead the audience to sympathize with Charlton Heston’s despair. In Soylent Green, however, Charlton Heston doesn’t seem to reach the end of his journey with the twist. It feels more like a midpoint in the story, an invitation for further discovery. As a true ending, though, the inefficacy of it hits all the harder.
(Also, Soylent shakes aren’t that good. They don’t have much of a taste and do a lousy job filling you up. So that “secret ingredient” can only improve it, right?)
(Kidding. I still wouldn’t touch it!)
