Soylent Green (1973)
Directed by Richard Fleischer
In the year 2022, overcrowding, pollution, and resource depletion have reduced society’s leaders to finding food for the teeming masses. The answer is Soylent Green.
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What critics compared Soylent Green to
The sci-fi genre has been clogged lately with films that run the gamut between young adult soap operas to a film like “Snowpiercer” that is reminiscent of a future akin to that of the future shock of “Soylent Green” or to a lesser extent the latest “Purge” offering.
Snowpiercer‘s comic book origins are most apparent in these moments, and references to everything from Dark City to Takeshi Miike to Soylent Green can be found littered everywhere else.
Metropolis (1926), The Time Machine (1960), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Soylent Green (1973), Blade Runner (1982) and Dark City (1998) all were forerunners of The Hunger Games , Divergent , and even the Transformer series.
The post-apocalyptic film has been done many times before – “Soylent Green,” “A Boy and His Dog,” “The Mad Max” trilogy, “Waterworld” are just some.
Billed as a comedy, Sorry to Bother You isn’t particularly funny, but it’s consistently offbeat and original—roughly akin not just to Get Out, but also They Live and Soylent Green, salted with an hipster wit all its own.
There’s a little “Soylent Green” and “Brazil,” The Truman Show” and Karl Marx in all this, and Riley gives this just-past-the-present future the sting of recognition, workers with zero power and no rights facing an economy stacked against them at every turn.
Looking as wild-eyed as Charlton Heston at the end of “Soylent Green,” Cassius goes on TV and screams, “They’re [third-act spoiler redacted], and nobody gives a f—!” Except guess what: Neither do we.
There's a lot of winking going on here that genre fans will recognize; everything from "Army of Darkness" ("This is my gnomestick!"), to "Soylent Green", and of course, George Miller's "Mad Max" movies.
You’d frankly be upset if there wasn’t a Soylent Green reference at one point, and there’s a well paid off answer to the old “stopping a bullet” cliché.
The Kid may in one scene use a pile of old VHS tapes as kindling for his fire, but it is from such materials that Turbo Kid has itself been forged – and much as the apocalypse survivors here drink water that has been extracted from human corpses, this is a film that cannibalises other films (not least Soylent Green, whose title is evoked by a cereal product named ‘Soleil vert’).
Not, perhaps, since “Soylent Green” has a future-shock parable been so memorably obvious in its metaphor.
, and — as I noted in my review of The Purge: Anarchy — probably the best satire on America since the grim futures that 1970s SF (think: Rollerball and Soylent Green) showed us.
Another thing he excels at is borrowing from other really good genre movies like Clockwork Orange, Soylent Green, The Warriors, Total Recall, and especially John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.
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"Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery," for example, feels like a dinner theater production of The China Syndrome, while "An Orison of Sonmi-451" borrows from V for Vendetta, Soylent Green and just about every other dystopian sci-fi flick this side of The Hunger Games.
A tapestry of juggled genres and two savvy "Soylent Green" references woven seamlessly together, they all add up to an entertainment that is, at once, a stirring high-seas adventure; an engrossing period drama that is everything 2011's confused folly " Readers of David Mitchell's massive, ruminative, centuries-spanning 2004 opus claimed it was unfilmable, but they were wrong; the key is in adapting said literature into a filmic language without losing the ideas and spirit behind the written word.
Though “Ascending” is half the title, people are always falling from incredible heights into an apparent abyss in the Wachowski siblings’ latest, a madcap mash-up of “Star Wars,” “Dune,” “Star Trek” and even “Soylent Green” that has impressive special effects but a narrative about as smart as a Buster Crabbe “Flash Gordon” serial.
A plot point involving the harvesting of humans was already explored with infinitely more complexity in " Cloud Atlas " and, before that, 1973's "Soylent Green."
"Jupiter Ascending" smashes together the narrative particles of everything from "Richard III" to "Soylent Green" with a cinematic style that could be called High Thor.
Great sci-fi has something to say about the human condition, this movie is only interested in looking cool and ripping off everything from “Flash Gordon” to “Soylent Green.”
Callbacks to films like The Wizard of Oz (tell me the Abrasax trio’s Gatling gun toting guards aren’t flying monkeys), Brazil (complete with a certain cameo), and Soylent Green (the filmmakers go one-step further after Jim Broadbent’s comic declaration in Cloud Atlas) are many, overt, and apt.
The story is clever without being convoluted, reaching an exciting, heartfelt climax, and the broader allegorical nature of the themes raised makes it feel like a throwback to the golden age of 1970s sci-fi like Soylent Green (1973) and Logan’s Run (1976), but with a distinctly modern execution.
Yet a Heston cameo would have been apropos, given that this adaptation of P.D. James' book harkens back to the cinema of the early 1970s, when Hollywood was hell-bent on churning out nightmarish visions of the future in such works as THX 1138, Z.P.G., The Omega Man and Soylent Green (the latter two starring Heston).
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The news is not good -- think less Deepak Chopra, more Charlton Heston in "Soylent Green."
The plot? It’s not a far cry from Soylent Green.
The film up to this point is solid future-paranoia “Soylent Green”-style hi-jinks, full of intelligent discourse and other surprises.
Though obviously rooted in present-day concerns about genetic engineering and cloning, the story has been cleverly cobbled from a quartet of classic '70s era sci-fi thrillers: "THX-1138," "Logan's Run," "Coma" and "Soylent Green."
The rationed near-future of Daybreakers recalls Soylent Green—except everyone knows they're eating people, because almost everyone's a vampire in 2019.