For the 11th of our TMR Movie Roundtables we welcome back our good friends Mark Campbell, Frank Johnson and Antony Rotunno for a four-way discussion on the 1973 eco-dystopian thriller movie Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young and Edward G Robinson, directed by Richard Fleischer.
By 2022, the processes of industrialisation and consumerism have depleted the world's natural respources and led to extreme global warming, overpopulation and severe food shortages. To meet demand, the Soylent Corporation—a massive, government-connected enterprise supplying countless millions—has developed subsistence foodstuffs in the form of highly processed wafers known as Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow. But now, the inhabitants of New York City (numbering around 40,000,000) can look forward to a new product: Soylent Green, a highly nutritious wafer ostensibly made from plankton. But not all is as it seems, as detective Richard Thorn (Charlton Heston) and his researcher Sol Roth (Edward G Robinson) discover as they investigate the assassination of an influential board member of the Corporation. Soylent Green, it turns out, isn't quite as advertised. "Soylent Green is ******!" (Just in case you haven't seen it yet).
Joins us as we discuss the film's production and storyline and consider some of its messages in relation to the real world of 2022.
[For show notes please visit https://themindrenewed.com]