Friday 4 September 2015

UNEASEFUL DEATH

















SOYLENT GREEN, d. Richard Fleischer (1973)

In the horrendously polluted and dangerously over-populated world of Soylent Green, the greatest thing a citizen can do for the state is to die. Those who volunteer for death are shown consideration, even kindness, often for the first time in their miserable lives, and, as they absorb a fatal cocktail of drugs, they are shown archive footage of a green, fertile Earth to the stirring accompaniment of 'Morning' from Grieg's 'Peer Gynt'.

The older Sol (the masterful Edward G. Robinson) takes no comfort from the footage, which simply reminds him all that has been lost since his youth, and why death is preferable to life in 2022 AD, regardless of what he knows will happen to his body as soon as his last breath leaves it. 

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