'Soylent Green' for all

Charlton Heston’s death April 5 has fueled much nostalgia about his classics: “The Ten Commandments,” “Planet of the Apes,” “Ben Hur.”

And yet, no one has been pointing to the most famous line in Heston’s film career: “Soylent Green is people!”

Why no one has cared to bring up 1973’s “Soylent Green” is not a mystery: It’s terrible. Even though critics make a career out of sadism, when a film star dies, it’s poor taste to bash on their worst roles.

But this logic is unfair to “Soylent Green.” Liking bad movies for being bad takes way more creativity than liking good movies or even movies that are so bad they’re good.
And “Soylent Green” doesn’t fit the so-bad-it’s-good category: It’s straight-up bad.

I’ve watched this atrocity four times, which I believe exceeds a legal sanity limit by three times. But I hope that, in sharing with you just how bad it is, you will take the opportunity to track it down and find creative ways to mock it for yourself.

“Soylent Green” is set in the year 2022, and the world has become so overcrowded that more than 40 million people are living in New York City. If you work out the math on this, it means everyone had some outrageous number of children between 1973 and 2022, but such major math errors are irrelevant when fear mongering.

Global warming has excelled so much that even with headache-inducing low camera lighting you can tell Heston is sweating the whole time, and the only food most people can afford is synthetic compounds called “Soylent.” There’s Soylent Yellow and Soylent Red, made from vegetable concentrates, and there’s the most popular, Soylent Green, which is made from plankton.

That is, it’s made from plankton until one of the executives of the Soylent Company is caned to death, in a scene so poorly acted that the “fourth wall” of the TV screen won’t stop you from squirming like the clumsiest kid in your high school just walked in your living room. Heston, a.k.a., Det. Robert Thorn, is put on the case. However, he fails to make much headway because rampant consumerism has turned everyone into a selfish asshole.

At least, that’s the explanation the movie wants you to believe. I’d say he probably could have solved it a lot sooner had he not spent so much time talking to his partner Sol (Edward G. Robinson, “Double Indemnity”), the film’s flat symbol of nostalgia who begins a lot of sentences with “I remember when … ” followed by remarks about how “good” real food was back in the day – descriptions so unappealing they made me lose my appetite.

The one-liners and dialogue in this movie are as melodramatic as its plot. Of course, these all culminate in Heston moaning (in the only scene that could have used more grandeur) from his death stretcher that “Soylent Green is made out of people! ... You’ve got to tell them, Soylent Green is people!”

Heston’s characterization of Thorn as a hardass is arguably the only redeeming aspect of the film in itself, but at the same time it makes his attempt at the melodramatic dialogue even more hilarious. He slags women off as “furniture,” including the one with whom he shares one of cinema’s most awkward shower scenes, set to lounge music. Afterward, he makes love to her with the air conditioner blasting. At one point, he takes a cigarette from a woman at a party and declares, “You know, if I had the money, I’d smoke two, three of these every day!”

The best scene in “Soylent Green” occurs when Sol takes off for a suicide-assistance center and Thorn chases him down, only to discover him watching a nostalgic nature video. After watching the video, which looks like a “Sound of Music” parody (and was parodied itself in a “South Park” episode), Sol dies a symbolic death, wherein he takes the human soul, biblical wisdom and other heavy-handed symbolism involving sunlight with him.

Sure, “Soylent Green” isn’t the best movie in Heston’s catalogue. But it reminds us what great actors can do with bad roles: make fools of themselves.