In Japan, it’s possible to hire a surrogate-a person who can pretend to be a friend or family member at weddings, baby showers, high-school reunions, and more. It’s implied Shirl may be a sexual partner for Simonson, but they also seem like friends (despite the obviously sexist power dynamic). When Thorn is called to investigate the suspicious death of wealthy William Simonson at the victim’s home, he meets a young woman named Shirl, who introduces herself as “furniture”-a companion for rich tenants provided by the apartment building. In a truly ironic twist, a company called Soylent markets a ready-to-drink plant protein product (also called Soylent) that found a fan base among tech bros and busy professionals who don’t want to cook. Roughly half of the country consumes protein shakes regularly.

(Soylent is scarce, too: When the precious stuff is distributed, riots nearly break out.) While it’s not exactly necessary for most healthy people to ingest nutritional supplements, a vast array of protein shakes, bars, and other meal replacements is now a regular part of the American diet. The Soylent Green of the title refers to a “high energy vegetable concentrate,” a tasteless source of nutrition for a world where unprocessed food is in very short supply. A report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that high emissions from fossil fuels could allow global warming to continue unchecked. On the West Coast, a heat dome suffocated parts of California, Oregon, and Washington State in temperatures well over 100☏. Heat emergencies were declared in Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston. In New York, it rose to 93☏, though that wasn’t close to the record of 100☏ set that day in 1944. The summer of 2022 saw record temperatures hit the Northeast. While winter hasn’t abandoned the world just yet, things are getting markedly hotter. After Thorn turns up his nose at spoiled margarine, Roth complains of the oppressive, year-round heat and “the greenhouse effect.” After waking, Thorn banters with his friend and roommate Sol Roth (Edward G. The opening scene of Soylent Green provides some blunt but necessary exposition. Now that we’re living in the year the film anticipated, did Soylent Green get anything right? The answer, unfortunately, is yes, though thankfully not all its dystopian ideas came true. New York police detective Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) investigates the murder of one such elite: a board member of the Soylent food corporation. In the year 2022, overpopulation and climate change hammer humanity those living in poverty have to rely on food supplements, while the elite loom over them in high rises. That holds true for Soylent Green, a 1973 feature film based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. The year is 2022, replace food for oil, and you have something scarily prophetic depicted here.Science fiction has always been a genre where authors can peer into the future-sometimes with alarming prescience. There is that obvious ‘70s art direction, but Fleischer’s green tinged photography give it an appropriately sickly look, and its relentlessly grim attitude still feels relevant. Robinson in his final role, as the friend and researcher to Heston’s Detective Thorn, who happens upon the secret to Soylent Green. This being a swollen world, every human ill is in abundance from crime to disease.īig Chuck Heston, as forthright and one-dimensional as ever, is the stern cop who smells a rat in the factory sized kitchen. Or at least the downtrodden desperate for hand-outs - there is a blackly comic aside in a boom in suicide services. Soylent green is the new wonder food stuff that will save humanity. It becomes a satire of planetary crisis, and also a play on cultural faddism. If our planet was too thick with people - the camera stays tight in on crowd scenes to give the idea of people physically pressing against each other - and food was running out, the rich would clamour for jars of jam, and the poor are given strange wonder foods by a disturbingly aloof government. The could-happen scope that Richard Fleischer assuredly brings the material, gives it startling quality. Adapted from the Harry Harrison novel, and set in a not-so-outrageously envisioned 21st Century, this is an effective dystopian fable because it presents a world of potential crisis. Often seen as the companion piece, if not the exact negative scenario, of The Omega Man, here we have Charlton Heston in a near-future assailed by overcrowding.