In today's episode, Nicky P and Danny review Soylent Green a film classic starring Charlton Heston in a post apocalyptic world ruined by global warming. What's To Review In Soylent Green? The year is 2022; the place, New York City. The world is on fire. A rash of heat waves has completed the desertification of Planet Earth, drastically reducing the global food supply and subjecting the majority of the population to lives of squalid poverty. New York is hot, dirty, and over-crowded. Only the elderly can recall a time when streams flowed freely, when deer roamed the woods, and when singing birds sailed in the sky. Only the elderly can remember a time when real food—steak, strawberries, apples, and cheese—was taken for granted. In 2022, with global agriculture nearly scorched out of existence, the only readily-available comestible is “Soylent,” a wafer apparently made from the ocean’s plankton. When a former director of the Soylent Corporation is found brutally murdered in his home, the cynical detective Robert Thorn is assigned the case. Soon encountering political pressure to drop the case, Thorn—along with his archivist friend Sol—discover that the dead executive was enmeshed in a mysterious and sordid conspiracy which, in the end, nearly drove him mad. Though hotly pursued by corporate hitmen, Thorn vows to uncover the conspiracy at the center of the Soylent Corporation and to prove it to the world. In this edition of The Road to Hell, Nicky and Danny discuss the meaning behind this sci-fi classic (while also addressing the film’s implicit and explicit reliance upon the controversial issues of man-made climate change and overpopulation). He who controls a nation’s food supply controls the nation. In Thorn’s 2022, the Soylent Corporation effectively controls America. Dive into the nightmarish world of monopolies and corporate crime, and discover the secret of “Soylent Green,” in this episode of The Road to Hell film review podcast! A Tropical Planet And Accidental Cannibalism In today's episode, we begin with Danny laying out his reasoning behind loving the film. He sees it as being a gritty archetypal police thriller with some strange dreamlike qualities. My own thoughts are slightly less enthusiastic. I see the film as a thinly veiled excuse to propagandize the fear of global warming. The flawed idea of global warming in which the entire planet continuously heats up is a fantasy used to push fascist plans of the elites. The way global warming would actually play out is by making a tropical planet with a better ability to produce plants and derivatively the things that eat plants. Politics aside, the heart of the story is Detective Thorn investigating a murder of a high-ranking member of the Soylent company. This leads down a rabbit hole ending in the unsettling secret at the heart of the dystopian society created in the film. The Soylent company which makes all the food required by an overpopulated planet, ostensibly out of plankton. But with loads of living people being scooped up and taken away and few people asking questions we have to wonder if the people are conditioned to ignore the obvious clues to the real origin of their food supply. The parallels to our own world give me shivers. A Hard World Makes Hard People But Humanity Lives On One of the first ideas that they hammer home is how different the world is. There are several scenes that show us that the standards of humanity have changed, the best of these include Detective Thorn. Thorn behaves like an aggressive, self-seeking, opportunist. He pilfers crime scenes for his own gain and bullies all witnesses to his own end. There's a scene in which Thorn is ransacking the dead man's apartment. He appears to be simply stealing things like meat, which have become luxuries in a world of scarcity. The truth is that even in a hard world not all of our humanity drains out. In another scene, Thorn interacts with a group of women companions, including one who belonged to the victim. Thorn interrupts and threatens the man acting as the defacto pimp for the women in his building for no direct gain for himself. In yet another scene Thorn refuses to back off of the case despite being directed to by his superiors. Despite the changes present, Thorn's humanity remains as intact as it can in the context of the world. Can Civility Reign In A Collapsing Society One of the big talking points we notice is the sexual environment of the movie. There are a number of interactions between Thorn and the female characters in the movie. Women are basically reduced to the playthings of the powerful men around them. This does not suggest that they aren't human but that there are serious changes in the gender roles of this far more scarce world. There is an implication that material conditions have a marked effect on the roles of individuals in society. In a world based on absolute physical power as a byproduct...
