YMMV / Soylent Green

• Adaptation Displacement: Next to nobody has heard of the book (Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison), but most people have heard about the movie, or at least "It's people! Soylent Green is people!" Which, incidentally, isn't in the book—it's just a straight-up Crapsack World.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Soylent Corporation. Corrupt corporation or doing what's necessary to keep civilization afloat? The fact that one of the executives is willing to take the secret to the grave and is pretty nonchalant about his murder implies that it may be the latter.
• Funny Moments: A few during the dinner scene, such as Thorn eating a leaf of lettuce and shrugging as if to say "I don't see what the big deal is."
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: While the modern world is far from perfect, the Malthusian catastrophe the movie predicted hasn't come to pass, with food production growing since the 1970s thanks to the Green Revolution.
• Heartwarming Moments: The dinner scene, when Thorn is treated to real food and uses a proper metal fork and knife.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Since 2013, there is now a dietary supplement company called Soylent. The company's founder chose the name for this reason. In April 2022, they actually released a line of green square snacks that invokes the film with the motto "As good as humanly possible."
  • The fictional Governor Santini of New York 2022 (played by Whit Bissell) bears a strong physical resemblance to former New York City Mayor and Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg.
• It Was His Sled: "Soylent Green is people!" A contender with "it was Earth all along" and "Darth Vader is Luke's father" for the world's most poorly-guarded secret and has been routinely parodied to hell and back in Sci-Fi comedies and plenty of other places, too. It has gone to the point where people today are more familiar with the phrase "Soylent Green is people" than they are with the actual work.
• Memetic Mutation: Again, "Soylent Green is people!" So much so that people only familiar with the iconic Wham Line are often surprised to learn that this isn't the main focus of the plot, and only turns up in the movie's final minutes.
• Once Original, Now Common: The environmental and overpopulation movement was still quite nascent when the movie came out in the early 1970s. The Green Aesop comes across as sensationalist nowadays but was relatively new for the time.
• Signature Scene:
  • Sol Roth's death, in which Thorn sees for the first time what the world used to look like.
  • "Soylent Green is people!"
• Squick: Depending on your squeamishness. While processing human bodies into food is horrifying, the processed human flesh doesn't resemble meat anymore; it's just a protein wafer. At that stage, it's pretty academic.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • The nature of Soylent Green is certainly ghoulish, but it is literally the only resource left; the populace has a Sadistic Choice of either cannibalism or mass starvation. Well, you know what they say; "Any option is preferable to extinction." Of course, one can also interpret that Charlton Heston's character was horrified by the realization of that horror in his famous "Soylent Green is People."
  • It is understandable that Soylent Green might become necessary, but Thorn dreads that governments could escalate to farming people like cattle. If governments are pleased with using the dead for food, outright massacring the poor for Soylent Green doesn't seem like too much of a stretch: it cuts down on the population and makes more food. And other methods of population control, like genocide or wars that are started to wipe out the surplus population will also become acceptable. Thorn dreads what horrors humans might do to prevent, or simply put off, extinction.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The big crisis that creates the dystopia of Soylent Green is overpopulation and a resulting massive food shortage. The film came out just five years after The Population Bomb, during a time when the world population had just grown by 20% in a decade and agriculture began to feel the strain of trying to keep up, so a Malthusian catastrophe late in the 20th century seemed plausible. However, these predictions didn't pan out, meaning that while many aspects of the film's dystopia are still relevant today, their core causes are rooted in a very 1970's view of the future.
  • In real 2022, the world's population sits at just under 8 billion rather than 40 billion, and New York proper has a population at just under 9 million rather than 40 million (even the expanded metro area has a population just above 20 million).^note As a point of reference, Greater Tokyo, the most populated metropolitan area in the world, sits at about 37 million people (though over a much larger area than New York City). Population growth is steady at about 1% annually, and many nations have seen their birth rates fall to below replacement levels. Contrary to the film, many countries are now fearing that declining birth rates could cause a future economic crisis as their populations grow to an older median age and retire. Many nations such as Russia and Japan have seen their populations outright decline over recent decades.
  • Thanks to major technological breakthroughs, such as genetically modified crops during the 1970s and beyond, we now overproduce and overconsume food. However, this could have been possible due to access to fossil fuels.
  • The movie depicts the New York City of 2022 as a decrepit ruin where people crowd into any space they can. As New York was in economic and social decline during this era, dystopian takes on New York's future were common. While the movie would predict the rising cost of living would make it hard to find an apartment, it failed to predict New York's economic recovery in the 90s.
  • For a film set in 2022, the lack of cell phones or computers is particularly jarring, unless the writers believed that resources would be so scarce as to stunt innovation. The most advanced technology in the movie is 1971's Computer Space, the first-ever arcade game.
    • On the other hand, it is perfectly plausible that innovation would be severely hampered in a setting where it's implied that basic literacy is becoming uncommon.
• Values Dissonance: When the movie was made, its predictions of an overpopulated and resourced-starved world were pretty apt. Nowadays, with many nations facing gradual population decline, partly because past fears of a Malthusian crisis lowered birth rates, the film's depiction of an overcrowded New York City comes across as especially sensationalist rather than prescient.
• Values Resonance:
  • While the movie's take on overpopulation is a bit sensationalist, resource shortfalls, pollution, and climate change are still hot topics today.
  • Shirl, a woman, was playing video games in a 1973 film. It looks very odd to many modern viewers that believe the stereotype that games are (and were) predominantly for men.

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