Soylent Green (2007, DVD)

The year is 2022, the place New York City. Overpopulation is rampant in this once-mighty metropolis, which now bursts at the seams with a staggering 40 million inhabitants. Mankind has ravaged the Earth in the name of industry, progress, and the all-hallowed economy. The soil is poisoned, the air is fouled, and nary a pristine spot remains on this overcrowded hell on Earth that is locked in perpetual summer thanks to global warming. For most, life is merely existence, and not much of an existence at that, unless you happy to be one of the few wealthy elite. Those areas where food can still be.

When organic foods start to look uniform, be scared. For example: eggs. We all know what an egg looks like. They all look pretty much the same. Yet no two eggs are exactly alike. They are laid by chickens who have different bodies, different cycles, different mates. There is no internal cookie cutter or mold that shapes their eggs. None of them have a built-in electronic egg timer. The eggies come out when they're good enough to sit on and hatch on their own. Egg McMuffins, on the other hand, all look the same. Between the prefab muffins and presliced squares of processed cheese you know what.

The title refers to the main food product of those days: made of soy + lentil, thus soylent. Set in New York City in the year 2022, "Soylent Green" is a scary look at Earth s possible future. Forty million people populate New York City, and Charlton Heston, as "Detective Thorn", is assigned to investigate the murder of one of the Directors of the Soylent Corporation, the leading food supplier of the world. Thorn finds the murdered director, played by Joseph Cotten in an excellent though brief appearance, had just been to confession, for the first time in many years. This little tidbit of...

"Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death, only a change of worlds." Chief Seattle, 1854 http://www.halcyon.com/arborhts/chiefsea.html The environmental movement as we know it today supposedly started in the early 70s and that is when this movie was made. It sure stays on message. The most touching message is not that when human beings destroy their environment, the nature part of the existence is gone and there are no more pretty scenes, but that, in destroying the environment, we destroy a part of ourselves, kind of..