The plot in a nutshell
It's the year 2022, New York City has a whopping 40 million inhabitants, and pollution, overcrowding, and all around ugliness abound.  Gone are all the amenities of life, and with little food, water and power, the world has become a giant cesspool.

Charlton Heston plays Robert Thorn, a police detective in this God awful future.  With little point to doing anything more than crowd control, the police spend much of their time taking bribes and fending for themselves.  But they still try to solve a crime occasionally, especially as one as big as the murder of a board member of the company Soylent Enterprises.  They make the little food wafers everyone survives on - soylent blue, soylent red, and of course, soylent green, made from plankton.

As Heston investigates, he finds himself too close to some shocking information, information that was too much even for the board member of the company to tolerate.  The film ends with the 'surprise' ending, and I won't spoil it for you until the spoiler section, although just about every show over the last 10 years had made a joke of it.

While the big surprise isn't really all that much of a surprise, the pacing and cinematography still make this film eerily familiar.  It seems just a tad too plausible at times, particularly since I watched it on the day of the Big Black Out of '03.  I switched between this film and news shows televising long gas lines and unruly crowds, and began to lose track of which was which...

Okay, it's not quite that bad, and I don't think we'll have to worry about snacking on soylent green in the next 20 years.  But the film has aged fairly well, and portrays a world that isn't that far from our own.

There is also some great acting here, in the form of Edward G. Robinson.  This was his very last film, and he died shortly after making it.  His skill and talent shine through in every scene he's in, and in particular, his reactions to the special meal that Thorn manages to provide are touching and telling all at once.

Chuck Conners also does a small role, handling it fine, and even Dick Van Patten, long before he found himself with too damn many kids on a tv show, has an itsy part.  The real star here is the sets and camera work.  It's a nasty world, where respect for human life is all but gone.  Futurama has suicide booths, and Soylent Green has its euthanasia department, but even with its pretty scenes and soft tunes, its the same thing.  When death is more attractive than life, what choice can there be?

Rating - Rent It
This isn't great science fiction, and it's not great acting.  But the movie is good entertainment, with a decent plot that rings a little too true these days.  As I read about schools buying thousands of webcams to watch students and teachers at every moment (for their own good of course), and as we debate the pros and cons of state assisted suicide, I realize that the films and stories of 25 years ago were more prophetic than we might have thought possible.

I wish I could recommend you pick this up - it was just released finally on DVD a week or so ago - but there's little in the way of extras.  If you're a diehard 70's sci-fi fan, than you'll be picking this up, but for most folks, just another viewing (or perhaps your first) is all that's required.

Spoiler Laden Thoughts
There's just that one big plot point...

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Soylent green is people!  Okay, like you didn't know that going in...