Soylent Green, 1973.
Directed by Richard Fleischer.
Starring Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten, Brock Peters, Paula Kelly, and Edward G. Robinson.
SYNOPSIS:
The minor classic Soylent Green arrives on 4K Ultra HD courtesy of Arrow Video, which commissioned a new commentary track, ported over the existing bonus features, and dug up a couple extras from the archives. The film was restored and looks great, of course. Highly recommended.
Soylent Green, released in 1973, takes place in the year 2022. Sure, the future it depicts is a product of the era in which it was made in many ways, but its underlying themes ring truer than ever 53 years later.
Charlton Heston stars as Robert Thorn, a detective who lives with Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), a former college professor who serves as a researcher for Thorn and is known as a “Book” because of his copious knowledge and reference library.
The world they live in is one of overcrowding and severe food and water shortages that have led to people sustaining themselves on food wafers made by the Soylent Corporation, whose new Soylent Green wafers are supposedly made from plankton.
Of course, there’s still an upper class in this dystopia, and they live in luxury apartment buildings where they keep sex slaves they call “furniture.” One member of that group, William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten) is murdered, and Thorn begins investigating the death.
Simonson’s furniture, a woman named Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), helps steer him in the right direction during Thorn’s search for the truth, which he believes was actually an assassination, not a murder by a random robber. Thorn’s search leads to a revelation that might not be as well-known as the one at Heston’s character discovers at the end of Planet of the Apes, but it’s still one that continues to resonate today.
This new 4K Ultra HD edition marks Soylent Green’s debut on the format, and it comes to us courtesy of Arrow Video, which continues to do a great job of bringing cult films and minor classics to the modern world of home video. The movie has been restored, and I’d say it probably looks as good as it did when it ran in theaters in 1973, so kudos to Arrow for another solid release.
The bonus features kick off with a pair of commentary tracks. The first one hails from 2003 and has director Richard Fleischer and actor Leigh Taylor-Young looking back on the making of the movie, while the other one is new and serves up historian Michael Brooke and author Johnny Mains delivering more of a “film class on a disc” kind of discussion.
Moving on, we have an archival 10-minute promotional video made for the film in 1973, a short tribute to the fact that this was Edward G. Robinson’s 101st film, and a pair of archival interviews with Heston and Fleischer: the former is from a 1985 BFI event and has the actor talking during a screening of the film (it’s audio-only and, yes, it’s basically a commentary track) and the latter runs 76 minutes and was filmed in 1994.
A trio of image galleries rounds out the platter.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
