Retrospective Film Review

Soylent Green (1973) • 50 Years Later

In a dystopian future, a cop stumbles across a powerful corporation’s horrifying plan to feed humanity…

There’s no getting round it: the most powerful scene in is spoiled by the intrusion of the star and the plot. After Sol (Edward G. Robinson) decides to volunteer for euthanasia in the desperately overcrowded then-future New York City of 2022, he’s promised — as a kind of final reward for his selflessness in helping to ease the problem — a precious 20-minutes of peace and space, two things almost completely absent from most people’s lives in this grim future. In the room where he’ll die, his final moments of solitude are accompanied by classical music and films of animals and nature: glimpses of a world that to those living in Soylent Green ‘s version of 2022 seems like a lost Eden.

It’s a poetic, moving sequence without words, which doesn’t need them, and its importance is confirmed later when some of the music is reused during the end credits. However, after it’s been allowed to unfold for a little while, Thorn (Charlton Heston) rushes to a…