Fleischer: Soylent Green (1973)

One of the more iconic science fiction films of the 1970s, Soylent Green takes place in 2022, in a dystopian New York besieged by global warming, pollution and overpopulation. Virtually everybody subsists on ‘Soylent Green,’ a food product that’s supposedly harvested from plankton – and the film follows what happens when policeman Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) takes it upon himself to investigate whether this is true. Released at the very cusp of neo-noir, or at least the cusp of the lush, lavish brand of neo-noir that Chinatown would popularise the following year, it’s as burnt-out and hard-boiled as some of the earliest noirs, completely disinterested in enshrining, canonising or even venerating their stylistic tics and flourishes. In that sense, it feels more like a continuation of noir, even an exhaustion of noir into science-fiction, rather than the self-conscious genre fusion that would characterise Blade Runner a decade later. Like many of those earliest noirs, it’s surprisingly disinterested in the street, or in the city – nearly all the action takes place in claustrophobic, low-ceilinged rooms, while the outdoor sequences aren’t especially interested in disguising the fact that they were shot on a sound stage. What is perhaps a bit different from those early films is the proliferation of extras, the sheer quantity of sweat that Fleischer wrings out of his crowds as he channels them through ever smaller spaces and passages, towards the final, grim revelation. Bookended by Joseph Cotten and Edward G. Robinson – who passed away shortly after shooting ended – those heaving crowds and masses end up revealing that noir split the difference between present and future so finely that it could only be fully recognised as science fiction after the fact. And it finally feels like Fleischer’s also trying to make the future as invisible as possible here, trying to conceal it deep within the present – from the very beginning, the film takes the cutting-edge of 70s science fiction and depletes it, blandishes it, demystifies it, but that’s exactly what allows it to retain the future so powerfully some fifty years later.