Soylent Green

Soylent Green is another example of how film can use the spectacle of science fiction to create a convincingly real, yet futuristic, setting. The execution fell short of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it still worked for me. The biggest problem for me was how disjointed the city felt; in some scenes, the streets are packed with people or cars, while in others, the streets are completely devoid of people and basically anything else, really. There's no clutter, no trash (at least, not as much trash as there should have been given the state of the city), and the city is dead silent at night.

Still, Soylent Green did a good job at depicting a convincing future despite there being no advanced or futuristic technology. And that's the part that's so interesting to me. When people think of science fiction, they think about the future and the strange technology it might hold for us. Think hovercars, lasers, and holographic projection. How neat would it be if your bathroom mirror had a direct stream to the weather channel? Soylent Green's world has none of that stuff. In fact, a lot of the technology in Soylent Green looks ancient and outdated by our modern standards (having to use an exercise bike to generate electricity, for example), and though that may simply be because the film itself is old, I think there's more to it than that.

Soylent Green isn't shiny and it isn't technologically advanced. The luxuries afforded to the wealthy are exactly the same as what we had decades ago: hot running water, air conditioning, fresh-cut meat, etc. Their cars are the same as ours. Their buildings look more or less like ours. But what the setting does have that we don't is a decaying New York City. For us, it's unprecedented. New York City has simply never been in such a sorry state as it is in Soylent Green (this is just conjecture, but I imagine that it wasn't even as bad during the Great Depression, though Soylent Green has the benefit of being pure fiction).

When you see the city, you can only think, "Wow, New York City doesn't look like that, and it never has," so the only other possibility is that it's New York City in the future, and that's not something a novel could do in as few seconds as it takes Soylent Green to do.

Also, another side note: the reveal at the end of the film, "Soylent green is people!" really caught me off-guard. Ignoring the fact that the build-up to the reveal was fantastic, and I really enjoyed it, there's actually a product called Soylent that's being made today. It's a drink that supposedly contains all the nutrients you need in a meal and is being marketed that way. So, going into the film, I kind of assumed that Soylent was, well, good. Now, I'm wondering who in their right minds would name their own food product after something that's made from people.