Film Reviews by AB

This is as powerful a film as when it was released in the early 1970s, when I first saw it. With stars Charlton Heston and an ageing Edward G Robinson giving deeply convincing performances It paints a picture in vivid detail of the end point of climate change and our dying planet. The scenorio hinges around a wealthy elite able to control the populace and maintain some sort of reasonable lifestyle while avoiding the fate of the people, who live in a hothouse of hell, with handouts of dubious flat biscuits or soylent (of the title) as food. There are also disturbing social and feminist narratives of women's exploitation by this same elite. Amazingly the original book Make Ready, Make Ready by Harry Harrison was set in 2022, so he was (hopefully) a few decades out in terms of the level of disintegration of the climate, social order and state of the planet. His population predictions were about 10 billion out too, and unsurprisingly the technology is dated. However, we watch such dystopian movies with the hope that the efforts towards renewable energy and better technologies might mitigate some of the damage. But this is one of those films you are umlikely to forget and a sharp reminder we can never be complacent in the face of our human impact on the planet and the political and social challenges we face to try to turn the juggenaut around. It is worth encouraging people particularly the younger generation to watch and take heed.