Soylent green
Margaret K. Eppler | 08/27/2010
(4 out of 5 stars)
"
this movie is just fantastic. made before computer images of blood and guts. it is just real enough to give you the willies. it seems this is the way the world is going. I saw it when it first came out and it is now so close to reality that it scares me more now than it did then. I sugest everyone should see it."
"People were always rotten.."
J. Michael Innes | Australia | 08/29/2010
(5 out of 5 stars)
"There is little to add to what has been said about this classic science fiction/future history film, made in 1973 , set in 2022 and so relevant to what was happening then and what is happening now. The story is well known, the characters equally so. A world which has run out of food, captured in a green house effect, a policeman (Heston), his "book"(fact checker and sleuth) (Robinson) and a corporation which controls both the food source and the government. But there is a line in it, spoken by Robinson, which seems to sum it all up. "People were always rotten." In the film the government, the science,the law enforcement agencies have all colluded to create a nightmare future of deprivation, fear and despair. It was clear enough in 1973, when I first saw the film, that it was beginning to happening and it seems clearer today that it is continuing to happen. Nothing has changed in human behavior to make the future any rosier. If anything, people have got more rotten and more blinkered. A viewing of Soylent Green should have been made mandatory for all politicians and climate change skeptics. It is now too late.
How amazing it must have felt to have been the creators of a film that was so prescient and to be the Cassandra of the times that no one has really wanted to hear. It was based on a book by Harry Harrison But the final story bears little relationship to the original. Harrison commented after the production that he felt bewildered after it all, at what had happened to his story, but that what had been created was really worth the change.
A remarkable film that deserves multiple reviewing, up there with the best of science fiction and the best of doomsday film. But perhaps it is too late to do anything now other than watch the film and despair."