Soylent Green (1973)
Another movie starring Charlton Heston, the 1973 classic Soylent Green is set in 2022 and predicts a world thrown off course by overpopulation, ecological disaster, and resource scarcity. Not a bad prediction!
However, the film’s central conceit—that the world is so radically resource-starved that a mega-corporation named Soylent resorts to feeding people to each other—was, uh, slightly off base. The film’s shocking twist ending reveals that a ubiquitous food product called Soylent Green is actually created using the bodies of dead people (it doesn’t count as a spoiler if the movie is 50 years old, sorry). The film also predicted that by 2022 New York City would have 40 million people living in it and, as crammed as the city currently is, I don’t think we’ve met that threshold yet. There is a company that ghoulishly named itself Soylent, but my understanding is that it’s just a nutritional supplement. That’s my understanding, anyway…
