Soylent Green, the iconic 1973 science fiction film, paints a chilling environmental dystopia where humanity has depleted Earth's resources and ravaged its ecosystems. The story unfolds in... 2022.
We've now entered the era envisioned by countless 20th-century sci-fi novels and films, with varying degrees of accuracy. Back to the Future Part II imagined 2015 with hoverboards and self-lacing shoes—yet to arrive. Blade Runner, set in 2019, captured a hyper-consumerist society breathless with excess, even if advanced humanoid replicants remain fiction. Nine years earlier, in 1973, Soylent Green—adapted from Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room!—unfolded its narrative in 2022. Let's explore its prescient warnings.
Director Richard Fleischer set the film in 2022 to create narrative distance from its 1973 release, shifting from the novel's 1999 timeline. The depicted world resembles a nightmare fueled by global warming: relentless heat waves, lifeless oceans, and exhausted natural resources. In an overcrowded New York City swollen to 40 million residents (compared to today's 8.5 million), these climate impacts breed profound social upheaval—chronic shortages, abject poverty, and widening inequality define daily life.
The film's stark shortages of water and food drive the creation of dubious synthetic alternatives (we'll avoid spoilers for newcomers to this classic). While we haven't reached that extreme, decades of IPCC reports—often met with inaction—have long warned of accelerating global warming's dire effects, including Arctic subsea permafrost thaw and looming disasters in the years ahead.
Social divides portrayed on a city scale in the film are poised to scale up nationally and globally, with vulnerable nations bearing the brunt of climate change far more than wealthy ones.
