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Hollywood spent the early 1970s imagining the near future as a place where the air was foul, the oceans were dead, and dinner arrived in wafer form, and for a while that felt like a comfortably distant proposition. The trouble with pinning a dystopia to a specific year, though, is that the year eventually turns up. Several of those films have now been overtaken by their own calendars, and the one that chose 2022 has aged into something its marketing department could never have planned for.
Soylent Green, Richard Fleischer's 1973 adaptation of Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room! is getting the most thorough home video treatment of its long life. Arrow Video has set July 28 for a limited-edition 4K Ultra HD release, according to Blu-ray.com, which lists the disc at $49.95 and currently discounted for pre-order. It arrives as part of an Arrow batch that also includes Michael Douglas' Falling Down and 2004's Troy.
The restoration is substantial, as Arrow scanned the original 35mm camera negative in 16-bit 4K at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging and graded the film at Silver Salt, presenting it in its original 2.39:1 ratio with both Dolby Vision and HDR10. The original mono soundtrack has been restored separately and appears here as LPCM. Blu-ray.com's Jeffrey Kauffman, reviewing the disc on July 13, gave the video a perfect five out of five and noted that the sickly green haze hanging over the outdoor scenes now reads as a deliberate choice rather than an artifact of an aging master. The film itself holds a 70% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Charlton Heston takes top billing as Detective Robert Thorn, but the film belongs to Edward G. Robinson as Sol Roth, the old man who still remembers what strawberries tasted like. It was his 101st and last film, as Robinson died of cancer on Jan. 26, 1973, twelve days after production wrapped, and Heston later wrote that Robinson knew he was terminally ill throughout the shoot and never missed an hour of work.
Arrow's extras lean into that history with MGM's original tribute to Robinson's 101st film, a commentary from Fleischer and costar Leigh Taylor-Young, a second track from Michael Brooke and Johnny Mains, and lengthy archive BFI audio interviews with both Heston and Fleischer.
The twist, of course, stopped being a twist decades ago, partly because MGM gave it away in the marketing before the film even opened. That has not stopped it from resurfacing, most recently when Vince Gilligan's Pluribus borrowed its shape wholesale for a fifth-episode reveal. Arrow is also issuing a standalone Blu-ray edition alongside the 4K, for anyone who has not yet made the jump and would rather spend the difference on lunch.
