In the far-off year of 2022, pollution and overpopulation have relegated most of the planet’s population to the streets. There, in teeming piles, they await the next delivery of clean water and highly processed food products. The projection is that New York City alone houses some forty million people, and we see evidence around every corner. Police detective Thorn (Charlton Heston), fortunate enough to afford a tiny, one-room apartment amidst such squalor, literally trips over the homeless as he navigates the lobby staircase each morning. His latest job whisks him to the environs of the über-wealthy, whose spacious, luxurious furnished quarters include video game consoles and conveyable live-in concubines. There to investigate a high profile murder, he happily samples such forbidden fruits and entrenches himself on the wrong side of powerful people with dark secrets.

Although its climactic reveal has been spoiled by half a century of references and punchlines, the actual context of _Soylent Green_ is still, mostly, apt. Shot in the early 70s, but inspired by a mid-60s science fiction novel, it’s very much an of-its-time depiction of a bleak and hopeless future. The metaphorical slope wasn’t quite slippery enough to get the real world to this point, fortunately, but it’s easy to understand the older generation’s concerns... mostly because we still share many of them. These big ideas are realized quite effectively on the big screen, and they’re the primary reason to tune in. The murder plot and corporate cover-ups, marred by Heston’s excessive histrionics, haven’t aged half as well.

I suppose modern cinema, technology, and the wonders of CGI has spoiled me; this is the second mid-1970's I've watched in the past couple days and it's just almost hard to sit through even a relatively short hour-and-a-half-long film that's this bad by today's standards. The acting was atrocious, the dialogue ridiculous, the storyline itself was so thin you could see the conclusion as early as 20 minutes into the film…and then it's wait another 110 minutes to plod through this awful thing. Not only that, the "conclusion" (that was supposed to be so shocking) was shouted at in one sentence at the very end of the movie. Very anticlimactic, one would think. It might have had more effect if…well, no...scratch that. I don't think there's any saving that conclusion; in fact, by today's standards, there's no saving this film AT ALL. This might have had some impact in 1973, when it was release but as I told someone, _"When a futuristic movie starts out with the opening scene reading_ **The Year: 2022** _you can't expect it to be all that great."_ (Hint: We're a year past "the future" already.) The "fight" scenes might have been laughable had they not been expected to be believable but these were like something out of the old 1960's "Batman" TV show...only worse. There was absolutely nothing dramatic, redeeming, or socially enriching about this movie: it was just a bad movie. If you haven't watched this one, don't. Save yourself 186 minutes of your time and watch two episodes of your favorite TV show. This movie was just terrible. Absolutely awful.

This story takes place in the bleak future of 2022 but it feels very much like 1973. There are some moments of inspiration but a number of tricks have been missed in imagining a dystopian future, notably race, gender and technology. I know that dystopia is supposed to be worse but it looks rather like 1973 instead of an degraded 2022. The story is good but almost everything else is dated. As such, it seems it may benefit from a remake but I think the reason it hasn't been remade is probably because it has actually be rebooted a number of times in other films and its actually a fairly simple plot.