"Soylent Green is people!" - well it's not in the novel the film's based on (Make Room! Make Room!), it's what it sounds like, soya and lentils.
But in the movie Sol's suicide and the revelation of the nature of Soylent Green aren't the real shocker. The real shocker is that Soylent Green is people because all the crops have failed. The planet's fucked. Utterly banjoed. Cannibalism (or more accurately, recycling human carcasses for nutrients) isn't the issue; the issue is that the end of civilisation as we know it is imminent.
But I guess even though Heston was into ecology back in the 70s you couldn't have a movie ending by saying "we're all going to starve to death!"...
Ironically the body-processing plant in the movie was a sewage works just outside LA that wasn't in use because of some legal tangle or other, and was bypassed by a 36" pipe spewing Angeleno shit straight into the Pacific Ocean....
Soylent Green and Make Room! Make Room! are very different entitites, both very good in their own way.
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Date: 2008-Jun-05, Thursday 22:40 (UTC)But in the movie Sol's suicide and the revelation of the nature of Soylent Green aren't the real shocker. The real shocker is that Soylent Green is people because all the crops have failed. The planet's fucked. Utterly banjoed. Cannibalism (or more accurately, recycling human carcasses for nutrients) isn't the issue; the issue is that the end of civilisation as we know it is imminent.
But I guess even though Heston was into ecology back in the 70s you couldn't have a movie ending by saying "we're all going to starve to death!"...
Ironically the body-processing plant in the movie was a sewage works just outside LA that wasn't in use because of some legal tangle or other, and was bypassed by a 36" pipe spewing Angeleno shit straight into the Pacific Ocean....
Soylent Green and Make Room! Make Room! are very different entitites, both very good in their own way.