The other night I watched an old film I hadn't seen since I was a kid. Then it seemed a bizarre, far fetched, even nightmarish sci-fi flick. The other night it seemed a far more frightening picture of a world more than possible in the coming years. Likely even.
Soylent Green came out in 1973, set in 2022. The opening credits (watch it here) chart mankind's decent into oblivion from the late 19th century to the modern distopia they predict. It seemed so poignant and relevant, I wondered if anyone had considered a remake. Not surprisingly, apparently IMDB do have a remake scheduled for 2012 and I'm really not surprised because it's incredibly prophetic and pertinent to today's crisis. The film stars Charlton Heston, not five years after Planet of the Apes which (for the time) evokes a much more common apocalyptic future: a nuclear one. The concept of global warming and over population were less the clear and present dangers they are today, with the focus much more on the nuclear threat. However, the reality of scarcity did hit home only a few months after the film was released in May 1973: the oil crisis. So the bubble of limitless and copious luxury dreamed up in the 1950s and 60s had only just begun to look vulnerable for most people. That the planet would become over-crowded, over-exploited and over-heated was only a worry for a few scientists until then.
So its 2022. The climate is out of control and new York is home to 40 million people, 20 million of them are unemployed. Heston - a policeman - has to climb over untold sleeping hoards in his stairwell to get to his tiny 1 room flat. Amid a global food shortage, people are rationed synthetic food supposedly manufactured from oceanic plankton by a company called Soylent. The latest miracle food is Soylent Green. (I'll leave the plot there so not to spoil it for anyone who's not seen it. The 2012 version will pick up where this leaves off.)
There is a scene (you can watch it here) where Sol (played by Edward G Robinson in his last movie - he dies 12 days after shooting ends) and Thorn (Charlton Heston) take enormous delight in eating a feast of beef and salad with bourbon to wash it down. The much older Sol says he hasn't eaten like that in years; Thorn says he's never eaten like that. (We still do eat like that but for how much longer?) In another scene (you can watch it here) in a voluntary euthanasia clinic plays beautiful images to Beethoven’s 6th of a natural world we recognize and Sol can remember fondly but Thorn says he cannot even imagine. At one point, the female lead (who's requirement to prostitute herself to tenants of a luxury flat earns her the nickname "furniture") fantasises about going to the country, which is of course forbidden so the precious farming land can be protected.
It's a dark movie (and not all that good to be honest) but it’s so much darker today when the bleak picture it paints seems almost inevitable than nearly 40 years ago when it was merely another imaginative science fiction romp. The shape of things to come, maybe.
Or is it?
Interestingly, the only real reference to technology is right at the beginning when the aforementioned "furniture" is bought a computer game as a present. It's a very large Asteroids video game. This suddenly reminded me of the incredible advances that have been achieved in only the last 12 years and I very quickly became quite hopeful about what can done in the next 12, (although it must be said the last 12 years have also seen absolutely no movement in combatting climate change).
Another sci-fi flick I watch recently was Moon, and although it mainly focusses on a very dark message about cloning, the plot does include a unique solution to Earth's energy shortage - Helium 3 which is farmed on the Moon. So maybe it won't all be so bad and humanity can save itself as it always has done before. After all, the Mutually Assured Destruction the Planet of the Apes foretold seems a thing of the past now, doesn't it?
Well it gave me hope anyway!