Soleil Vert, a cult science fiction film released in cinemas in 1973, tells in an environmental dystopia how the population has exhausted the Earth's resources and destroyed its environment. The action takes place there in... 2022.
We have just entered head on into a period that all science fiction books and movies of the last century imagined, with more or less success. Back to the Future 2 was happening for example in 2015, but unfortunately we still didn't have a hover board or self-wearing shoes. Blade Runner , too, was set in 2019. And while humanoid robots didn't thrive like in Ridley Scott's work, the 1982 film did depict a hyper-consumption society breathless. Nine years earlier, in 1973, came out Soleil Vert , taken from the eponymous novel in French, whose action takes place in 2022. Let's see what that foreshadowed.
The director of the film Richard Fleischer had at the time decided to place the action in 2022, to move away a little more from the date of release of the film, while the book took place him in 1999. And the company which is told looks like a nightmare caused by global warming . Warming that caused a permanent heat wave , the death of the oceans, the depletion of natural resources . In an overcrowded New York with its 40 million inhabitants (the city has "only" 8.5 million today), these deleterious effects of global warming have serious social consequences. Shortages, severe poverty and increased inequality are the daily life of the inhabitants.
The shortages exposed in the film relate to both water and food , leading to the manufacture of artificial foods of gloomy origin which we will not talk about more to keep the surprise to those who would like to see this classic. If we don't live in this dystopia, the numerous IPCC reports published and then immediately ignored have alerted us for long enough on the disastrous repercussions that we will face in the coming years with an accelerating global warming, going so far as to melt the submarine permafrost in the Arctic.
The social inequalities described in the film on the scale of a city will most certainly be confirmed but at the level of entire countries , with countries more affected than others by climate change, whose populations will suffer much more than those of developed countries.
