In
1973, the American film director Richard Fleischer released the film Soylent Green, based on the 1966
science-fiction novel Make room! Make
room! written by Harry Harrison, although there are quite a few
differences between the book and its film adaptation. This dystopian film describes
a future society (it’s supposed to happen in the year 2022, i.e. just now) where
there is a very serious problem of overpopulation (New York alone is inhabited
by 40 million people), which leads to a huge food shortage.
The Soylent
Company, which appears in the film's title, centralizes the production
of food obtained from concentrated vegetables, and markets them under names
that depend on their color: Soylent yellow, Soylent red and Soylent
green. Every time this last product is put up for sale, there is an
avalanche of buyers, many of whom cannot acquire it, because stocks are quickly
depleted.
The
protagonist of the film (represented by Charlton Heston) is a New York City
policeman who lives with his assistant, an older ex-professor (Edward G.
Robinson), who investigates the murder of one of the top managers of the Soylent
Company and discovers that the Soylent green product is made by
recycling meat from human corpses. To prove to his friend that what he says is
true, he submits to voluntary euthanasia and orders him to follow his corpse.
Thus the protagonist discovers that all the corpses are transferred to the Soylent
company facilities, where they are converted into Soylent Green. But when
Heston tries to make public his macabre discovery, he is attacked and badly
wounded, while the public ignores his warnings.
