OMG, Moses died!

It has been said that when Charlton Heston died, ppl would say, “There was an actor.” Well, he died.

Charlton Heston’s death brings to mind some real blockbusters (“ I am the pharaoh's daughter, and this is my son. He shall be reared in my house, as the prince of the two lands.”), but also a lot of mediocre but entertaining potboilers, and one underrated but prescient movie: Soylent Green. Soylent Green is not remembered as well as, for example, Planet of the Apes. A lot of ppl remember lines like “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!” and, “ You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Not as many remember Charlton’s closing line from this one.

Soylent Green didn’t deal in the silliness of the ascendancy of apes. It dealt with the Greenhouse Effect, a population explosion, class strife, food shortages, the secularization of the clergy, euthanasia, and the pauperization of intellectuals, among other things - all very real possibilities and/or realities to be.

The year is 2022. New York is overpopulated. There are 40 million ppl stockaded there, the rich and poor segregated, but everybody short of natural food. The condition of the world is the result of a pivotal ecological disaster. Greenhouse gasses have overwhelmed the earth's ability to absorb its industrial and consumer insults.

Ppl subsist on a combination of soy and lentil (soy-lent) protein chips, which come in a variety of flavors (red, yellow) made by the Soylent Corporation. There’s a new new high energy version, green, that is much sought after, and is supposedly made of plankton. When trucks bearing soylent green arrive, food riots often ensue, cuz there's not enough to go around.

Charlton is a cop who rooms with an aged professor played by Edward G. Robinson. His apartment has no food, no water, no air conditioning. But he is assigned to investigate the murder of a rich Soylent Corp. executive. Instead of looking for clues or evidence, however, he snags the Exec's booty: some meat, some bourbon, some soap, and the exec’s “furniture” (played by Leigh Taylor-Young). He breathes deeply and washes in air conditioned comfort – with the furniture. :)

In the apartment he also finds some oceanographic reports which, though he couldn’t be less interested in the investigation, he knew would interest the professor. It turns out that the exec was killed because he knew what soylent green was made of. EG proceeds to figure it out.

EG finds out the truth, but does not want to deal with the truth. He requests euthanasia (euphemistically known as "going home"). Charlton is left to put the pieces together on his own. He does, by following the waste disposal trucks leaving the government euthanasia facility. And having learned the horrific truth, in the end he is wheeled out yelling, “You gotta tell ‘em! Soylent Green is people!”

They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.