To me, this movie is perfection.

Just perfect...

Best movie of this year hands down!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Soylent Green starring Charleston Heston is a very good action science fiction film, although slightly dated in my opinion. Charleston Heston plays a non-stoic character for once- he plays a detective in a crime ridden overpopulated New York City of 2022, and lives with an older man and they spend their hours talking nostalgically of the past. A company called Soylent Corporations processes a food product from the Oceans called Soylent Green which is nutritious plankton but in short supply. When a board member of this company is killed Heston goes on an investigative journey which concludes with one of the most shocking endings of all time. This is a good film to watch from the early 70s.

Made in 1973 but set some 50 years in the future "Soylent Green" imagines a world so over-populated that people sleep on staircases and queue up for the food of the title, farmed out to them from food-banks. The twist in the tale and the fact that the film marked the last screen appearance of Edward G Robinson, (he died soon after completing it), has earned it a certain celebrity amongst Science Fiction films and Robinson does lend it a touch of class it would otherwise have lacked, while the film's one great sequence is built around him.The plot involves policeman Charlton Heston, at his most wooden, investigating the murder of bigwig Joseph Cotton, a major player in the Soylent Corporation. Richard Fleischer was the director so you know that at least it's going to be a very professional job of work but perhaps its reputation is unnecessarily inflated. If you know the punchline then you know everything leading up to it doesn't stand up to repeated viewings. Entertaining for what it is, though.

The film is worth it to see the performances by Heston and Robinson (especially Robinson, since it was his last film). However, it's hardly anything resembling an accurate prediction of the future. The events in it are obviously a reflection of the attitudes expressed by people such as Paul Ehrlich, who has made a career out of incessantly predicting dire consequences from having "too many people and/or too much technology and/or too much capitalism". His predictions have all turned out to be wrong, including his famous bet with Julian Simon about the future price of metals. There are actually MORE trees in the US than there were 100 years ago. The fruits of capitalism, such as smart phones, have hardly made us poorer, nor has the much ballyhooed rise in global temperatures had the predicted apocalyptic consequences. There is no mass starvation due to an environmental catastrophe, and the rather silly depiction of a New York City with a population of 40 million in 2022 is obviously wrong (the city has grown by a few hundred thousand since the movie was made). Unfortunately, many people don't allow a little thing such as reality to get in the way of what they believe.

"Soylent Green" is the last really good quality film in Charlton Heston's career. The film has some good scenes but the plot could have been stronger. The action scenes are very good. This film belongs to Edward G. Robinson in his last on-screen appearance. Shooting began about November 1972 and he passed away not long after shooting had finished in January 1973. He finished on a good one. The sense of urgency and of danger is all too clear as Charlton Heston takes on a political conspiracy that involves the city of New York being overcrowded. A good film but not as good as "The Omega Man."