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If you take out the post-apocalyptic setting, Soylent Green is just a generic police procedural, where a hard boiled cop investigates an obviously suspicious murder that is obviously linked to an obviously shadowy corporation that's trying hard to hide one of its shadowy secrets. Nobody really appears to be starving, and the body strewn streets of New York are clearly just the MGM back lot with a few more extras around than usual. The world the movie creates is certainly bleak, and the story plays lip service to some big ideas. But when we get to the end, and the famous Soylent Green plot twist, it feels cheap and anticlimactic.

At the end of Planet of the Apes or The Sixth Sense, the movie was turned on its head; the Big Reveal forced you to look at the film from a different perspective. But the payoff came from the fact that up to that point, the story touched on some pretty significant themes. Soylent Green does no such thing - we see images of hungry people, but we don't explore what it means to be hungry in any significant way. There are lots of sooty extras, and plenty of self-aware monologues delivered by characters who clearly know they're in a movie. There's even a prostitute caste (charmingly referred to as "furniture") that exists mainly to add sex appeal to an otherwise dull story and to provide Thorn with a perfunctory love interest.

And also, sexism.

But not once does the story touch on WHY a woman would subject herself to such a thing in such a world. We see many of the by-products of starvation and deprivation, but we almost never examine the human cost, never connect with the characters or their world, and therefore feel almost nothing when Heston makes his famous declaration at the end. And even the moment itself isn't quite what it's cracked up to be. More people remember Phil Hartman's parody of it than likely remember the original line. Soylent Green is less an "end of the world" film than it is something meant to cash in on the "end of the world movie craze" that dominated the 1970s. It is essential viewing for movie buffs only; for anyone else seeking a post apocalypse/Charlton Heston fix, a better option would be The Omega Man, or of course, those damn dirty Apes.

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