We all know the ending of the movie Soylent Green, right? Charlton Heston reveals that it’s (gasp!) made out of people. So it never really dawned on me before what exactly they could do with this revelation, but in case you were wondering, it’s nothing. They can’t do anything about it, because after all, they’re not eating Soylent Green out of choice! In this dystopian future Earth, there’s nothing else to eat! So for a big reveal in a movie, I suppose it’s a horrifying revelation for the viewer in the theater (or at home watching it on TV), but what about for the world inside the movie?
It never struck me until today what a jerk move it is for Charlton Heston’s character to scream out to everyone the fact that Soylent Green is made out of people. Because after all, what else could they eat anyway? Nothing! There is nothing else to eat, and that’s why they’re making food out of people to begin with! So what, exactly, was Charlton Heston’s character trying to accomplish by revealing this fact to the world anyway: to ruin everyone’s dinner? When you think about it, the only other option people in the movie have is just to go hungry, and I doubt they’d choose that. If Ethan Hawke ate his buddies in Alive, I think the people in Soylent Green will happily eat the people-burgers. After all, they have been all along up to then anyway! So what's the difference?
In fact, there is a really big possibility that Charlton Heston, by blabbing to everyone that Soylent Green is made out of people, could cause a huge problem, and I’m not referring to people rejecting Soylent Green as a food source! That’s right: I’m talking about the fact that once people realize how much they’ve enjoyed eating people all along, they might just start taking bites out of the people all around them! They may not even be willing to wait for them to die anymore! In fact, fresh, living people might be much better-tasting than the Soylent Green! So then we’ve got a whole new cannibal-apocalypse movie franchise: Soylent Green!
In Soylent Green 2: Made out of People, the people, fresh from learning that Soylent Green is made out of people, decide to make their meals out of pieces of flesh freshly ripped off of random, live people (!). Then, in Soylent Green 3: Mad, Out of People, there is a food crisis again, and with most of the people of the world already eaten, characters in this movie must begin to eat their own families and even themselves to survive!
Move over flesh-eating zombie movies: you’re not horrifying enough anymore! For there’s nothing more horrifying than casual, contemporary, cannibal carnage, especially when it's on a world-wide scale! And that’s what they’ll get, now that we all know that Soylent Green is made out of people: It’s People! (Thanks a lot, Charlton! No wonder you joined the NRA: Being proactive about defending your delicious-self from all of us hungry, hungry humans? I thought so! {Cheater!})
