Film

Soylent Green

Name: Soylent Green
Genre: Science Fiction, Crime, Mystery
Released: 1973
Cast: Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters

Dystopian sci-fi
Very dark

A grim, sweaty procedural wearing sci-fi clothes: Charlton Heston plays a cop investigating a murder in an overheated, starving 2022 New York, and the mystery he uncovers is really an indictment of the world around him. It's slow, talky, and dated in places, but its dread about ecological collapse and corporate secrecy still lands, and that ending has earned its infamy.

TMDb rating

3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like a gumshoe mystery bleeding into dystopia, where the squalor is as gripping as the case, and you enjoy grimy 1970s paranoia.

Skip it if you need brisk pacing, since the film lingers on mood and slow conversation, and its 1970s look and sentimental streaks can feel dated.

What it asks of you: It asks you to settle into a slow, smoky mood for about an hour and a half, giving it patience rather than constant action.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Logan's Run1976

Another 1970s dystopia where a state-sanctioned lie about survival unravels once someone actually goes looking for the truth. Same paranoid, sun-bleached texture, same distrust of comfortable systems.

But The special effects and pacing are pure disco-era camp; if Soylent Green's slowness bothered you, this won't fix it.

Blade Runner1982

A weary detective wandering a decaying, overcrowded future city, uncovering something the powerful would rather stayed buried. It's the moodier, more visually radical cousin of Soylent Green's premise.

But Cerebral and deliberately opaque — it rewards patience rather than delivering a tidy mystery payoff.

Planet of the Apes1968

Heston again, again undone by a society built on a secret too monstrous to say out loud. If you want more of that specific 'oh no' final reveal, this is the original template.

But Broader and pulpier, with makeup effects that show their age more than the ideas do.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Soylent Green

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Metropolis1927

Same core structure: a privileged surface concealing the literal human cost beneath it, discovered by someone who finally goes down to look.

Decades before Heston ever put on a badge, this silent epic imagined a gleaming city built on a starving, exploited underclass whose labor secretly sustains everyone above them.

But Silent, melodramatic, and nearly two and a half hours — a real commitment if you've never sat with early cinema.

THX 11381971

George Lucas's chilly debut imagines total societal control through drugs and surveillance rather than famine — same era, same suspicion of institutions claiming to know what's best for you.

But Cold and clinical by design; it's more of a mood piece than a plotted thriller.

Silent Running1972

Made the same year as Soylent Green and sharing its ecological grief — Earth's plant life reduced to museum pieces on a spaceship, tended by one increasingly desperate man.

But Earnest to the point of sentimentality, with a tone that swings between elegy and children's-adventure sincerity.

Children of Men2006

A society past its breaking point, a protagonist dragged into a conspiracy bigger than himself, and a sense that collapse has already happened and everyone's just pretending otherwise. Bleaker and better shot.

But Its despair is more visceral and immediate — less pulp mystery, more sustained anxiety attack.

Rollerball1975

Corporations have replaced government entirely and pacify the population with violent spectacle — a different flavor of the same 1970s fear that the people in charge have quietly stopped caring about you.

But The sport-as-metaphor conceit is heavy-handed, and the pacing sags between action sequences.

A Boy and His Dog1975

A pitch-black, jokier take on post-collapse survival, where scarcity has turned people into predators and irony is the only defense mechanism left.

But Deliberately nasty and misanthropic humor that some viewers find more alienating than funny.

Zardoz1974

Sean Connery in a nappy, ruling over a bizarre stratified society built on lies about scarcity and immortality — for when you want the era's dystopian anxieties turned all the way up to psychedelic.

But Genuinely one of the strangest, most self-serious-yet-ridiculous films ever greenlit by a major studio.

Koyaanisqatsi1983

It's the nonfiction version of the same anxiety — humanity outrunning the planet's capacity to sustain it — stripped down to pure imagery and rhythm.

A wordless, hypnotic documentary of overcrowded cities and strip-mined landscapes set to Philip Glass's score — the ecological dread of Soylent Green with no plot, no dialogue, just images doing the arguing.

But There's no story and no characters; it's a mood experience, and some will find it maddeningly slow or pretentious.

Dead Poets Society1989

Both build to the same gut-punch reveal — that the elite's comfort is quite literally made from the bodies of everyone else — but one plays it as tragedy and the other as a splatter joke.

A gonzo body-horror satire where the wealthy literally, grotesquely feed on the underclass at their parties — Soylent Green's class-cannibalism metaphor made disgustingly, hilariously literal.

But Deeply trashy, gross-out practical effects and a shrieking tone that plays as comedy as often as horror.