Soylent Green is made from fail!

One of the current favorite "Global warming isn't happening" BSes right now is that "30 years ago, scientists thought believed the world was getting colder. They don't know either way."

Interestingly, I watched the 1973 "classic" Soylent Green today. You know what one of the major factors of the long-term world-wide food shortage was, alluded to several times throughout the movie? "Greenhouse effect." Global warming drastically changing the worldwide climate in a short time, decimating ecological systems already damaged by wide-scale pollution.
1973, guys.
So much for "everyone thought."

Actually, less than 10% of the scientific papers at that time supported global cooling. But then, as more recently, the media jumped on the one that isn't the fault of the people who pay for commercials. [This is why I do not pay attention to the American news media. For 20 years, every peer-reviewed scientific paper supported global warming, and in the same period 51% of mass media accounts questioned or denied its existence. Either the journalists involved are liars, or they couldn't ID a legit source to save their souls. Either way, they're worse than worthless.]

You know, some days the only reason I'm not a conspiracy theorist is because human beings just can't plan that well.

Anyway, Soylent Green being made from fail. Major problems in this "sci fi" movie:
1) Little if any effort into reasonable future prediction.
2) Minimal tension in the plot, and an "insanity inducing revelation" that's actually rather tame.

First and foremost, how does this movie really feel about women? 1973, the Equal Rights Amendment was a hot topic in America. Women's rights were a major topic of debate, and feminism had already been turned into a bad word, and probably declared passe. [I suspect that "post-feminism" rhetoric started in 1905. I have actually seen it in a work from 1963.] The movie is set in 2022, about 50 years after the movie was actually made. So how did the director predict the advancement of women in 50 years after this landmark and controversial moment?

He didn't. To the contrary, he reduced women to a level of chattel that hasn't been seen since... Ever. Maybe in ancient Athens, if you squint. Women are literally reduced to being furniture; they are called that in the movie. When they get speaking lines. The women we see without speaking lines mostly get shot as innocent bystanders. We are firmly in 100% male fantasy territory here.

I suppose this shouldn't be so surprising, though, since this movie set 50 years in the future looked like it was taking place 50 years in the past, in post-WWI Germany. Babushkas and canvas aprons are the latest fashion for anyone not rich or on the police force. Technology had made no advancements, at all. There were no computers, which by 1973 was obviously the way the future was going; we see one video game, which is pretty blatantly a 1973 arcade game with a niced-up case. Even making terribly generous allowances for the global screw-ups to have unrealistically halted technology in its tracks, it looks as though that happened in 1965 in this alternate word. I'd be more forgiving of "oh, it's our old future" type errors than just not doing anything at all. Pure laziness.

So if you're expecting a sci-fi movie, you're going to be really disappointed. It's actually a cop movie, with Scooby Snacks. As far as world building and special effects go, Soylent Green makes Logan's Run look like The Matrix. It's that bad.

OK, so what about the plot? Does that pull it out?
Um, no. We all know the twist, right? "Soylent green is people!" [Who in God's name ever decided to point a camera at Charleton Heston? *shakes head*] Well, knowing that, there's no point in watching. Honestly, I don't think there was a lot of point if you didn't know that going in. I mean, I go into this thinking "OK, so we're rounding up old and poor people and political prisoners and people who didn't vote for the winning party, and killing them, and making them into Soylent Green, right?"

Um... No, not really.

Well, we're at least "disappearing" and brutally murdering them to make this stuff, right?
Well, no.

Concentration camps?
Um... Well, actually we just take people who died on their own, and reduce the bodies to basic proteins in snack cracker form.

So, no murders to make this stuff? No vast bloody conspiracies? No inhumane treatment?
No, that stuff doesn't really have a good return on investment.

Yes, this is the revelation that drives two characters insane: We take already dead bodies, and we process the living hell out of them, and we sell them as Scooby snacks.

... Maybe I'm really morbid, or maybe I'm practical to an unhealthy degree, but this doesn't quite horrify me so much. I'm not saying I want my Cheez-Its to be made out of someone's dead grandma, mind. But we've got a world here were virtually all sources of food have been decimated. Farms are locked up like Fort Knox and yet produce at such a low rate that a misshapen stalk of celery, two small apples, and a head of lettuce will cost you $220. Even the ocean environment has been destroyed so that plankton harvesting and aquaculture are no longer viable. Why toss away a hundred pounds of protein that isn't being used any more, when it is the difference between life and death for another living human being? It's not like people are being killed to produce the stuff. No murder = no horror.

I almost think the writer realized at the last second that his story had no punch, but had no time to rewrite. So instead he has the post-revelation Heston shout "Next they'll be breeding us like cattle."

Um... Again, no, I'm not seeing it. Humans are a terribly inefficient protein source. On the other hand, chickens (the most efficient food animal) produce a pound of meat for every two pounds of feed. Even if only highly adaptive animals like humans have survived, we're still going to have our equally adaptive rats and cockroaches. So, instead of breeding humans for meet, and given the movie establishes a 50% unemployment rate, I foresee gathering up all the "surplus population", chopping them up, and using them to establish a supply of chickens (or rats, or roaches, or whatever) at a sustainable level to support the now significantly smaller human population. Unless maybe we do the "Modest Proposal" thing and keep it to chomping babies, who haven't consumed much more than has been put into them, and we could get some good work out of their pregnant mothers in the meantime.