History Film / SoylentGreen

* PopulationControl: ''Frighteningly averted''. The governments refuse, or are too incompetent, to enforce birth control. [[ElephantInTheLivingRoom The painfully ignorant citizens do as they please]], rioting in the streets whenever there's a food shortage, which is often. It might be somewhat justified by the fact that this movie was made in a time when birth control wasn't as readily available (or as reliable) as it is today, and abortions were still illegal across most of the US, as it was simply going by then-current predictions of population growth.

[[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture The year is 2022]]. Overpopulation has brought [[GaiasLament environmental]] and [[FallenStatesOfAmerica economic collapse.]] In [[BigApplesauce New York City]], pop. ''40,000,000'' (its population in the real 2022 was about 8.5 million, not much higher than in 1970), police detective Frank Thorn (Heston) is investigating the burglary-turned-murder of wealthy businessman William Simonson (Creator/JosephCotten), a board member of the food rations manufacturer [[PeaceAndLoveIncorporated Soylent Corporation]]. Based on the fact that there was [[KleptomaniacHero valuable food and books left for him to steal]], and that his bodyguard Fielding (Creator/ChuckConnors) and [[HookerWithAHeartOfGold 'furniture']] Shirl (Creator/LeighTaylorYoung) were conveniently away at the time, Thorn believes it to be an assassination. He gives Simonson's oceanographic survey (which he himself stole) to his elderly roommate Sol Roth (Creator/EdwardGRobinson), a book collector who remembers happier times, and they have a memorable scene cooking up the food that Thorn also stole from the late Mr. Simonson.

Last film for Edward G. Robinson, who died of cancer 12 days after production wrapped.

* MiracleFood: The Soylent Corporation produces cheap, nutritious food to sustain Earth's overpopulated masses. Subverted with the [[ItWasHisSled infamous]] revelation that [[HumanResources "Soylent Green is people."]]

** Sol, seeing an apple and some beef, is broken by seeing all this good food being so rare, asking "How did we come to this ?"

* DrivenToSuicide: Sol hates what the world has become and mutters about how he should have "[[DeadlyEuphemism gone home]]" ages ago. He eventually decides that the time has come when he finds out that the entire ocean is devoid of life now and the human race is forced to eat its own dead to survive.

* FromBadToWorse: The movie opens in an overcrowded, resource-starved world, then it is revealed that the government is making food out of people, and then [[spoiler: it turns out the ocean is dead]].

** Sol, seeing an apple and some beef, is broken by seeing all this good food being so rare, asking "What have we come to?"

* BookDumb: It's implied that ''almost everybody in the world is''. Simple information gathering in the reference books is considered to be something a specialist "Book" should do, the only people shown reading the books are the people at the specially dedicated "Exchange", the education system is implied to be reduced to the basic skills only, and - if it's not just sarcasm - Thorn at one point actually asks Fielding if he ''can write''. And given that all the people at the Exchange we're shown are ''old'', it means that on top of everything elsewwith that CrapsackWorld the knowledgeable people who could have at least tried to still figure out something will ''die out even more quickly than the rest of the population''.