Soylent Green (1973) 97m. In THE OMEGA MAN, Charlton Heston played the last human on Earth, wandering an empty city alone. Two years later he’d have exactly the opposite problem – fighting for room in a city of 40 million. The year is 2022, and Heston is Detective Thorn, a New York cop investigating the murder of a director of the Soylent Corporation, a powerful food processing company responsible for the manufacture of vegetable concentrate biscuits. Thorn is impressed by the wealth of the victim (in this future, “rich” means being able to afford running water and strawberries), which enables comforts that he and his roommate Sol (Edward G. Robinson) can only dream of. In such an overpopulated world, it’s only to be expected that life is cheap. People crowd like refugees, living from hand to mouth; attractive young women are rented out with apartments and referred to as ‘furniture’. SOYLENT GREEN is relentlessly downbeat; the future is not only crowded but also polluted (everything outdoors is filmed through a green haze), economically repressed, nearly bereft of all natural resources, and suffering from the Greenhouse effect. Director Richard Fleischer doesn’t show us huge mob scenes (apart from one riot sequence) or grand views of an out-of-control, decaying megalopolis, but instead gives us the sense of such a future by focusing on elements of daily life that have irrevocably changed as a consequence. Robinson’s Sol, who is pointedly the ‘soul’ of the film, is our emotional and philosophical connection to the unspoiled past – his memories are supposed to be ours – and provides the film’s only touching moments. It’s a rare film that makes death (by euthanasia) a pleasant and more preferable alternative than living, but in SOYLENT GREEN humanity has reached a dead end: it posits that at a certain level, there are no solutions. In fact, the revelation at the film’s end (which you’ll probably guess beforehand if you haven’t already heard), if reappraised, may not be the act of evil and exploitation you’ll first think, but the only viable plan left for survival – it will make you wonder about the lengths humanity will go to in order to remain on the planet, and whether it is even necessary if the more noble of human qualities are to be forfeited as a result. SOYLENT GREEN works when it operates at a shabby, grass-roots level (it was a mistake to try to pass off a 1970s video game as 21st century technology!) and makes the interesting, if depressing, point that squalor never dates. Harry Harrison wrote the source novel, ‘Make Room! Make Room!’, and was critical of the film production. Robinson died soon after it was released (adding poignancy to his death scene). At least he left us with a solid, resonant performance. [email]sburridge@hotmail.com[/email]