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Released 50 years ago, “Soylent Green” is an eerie prophecy

It features Charlton Heston as a sweaty cop in the New York of 2022

家庭娱乐

50年前上映的电影《超世纪谍杀案》是个可怕的预言

查尔顿·赫斯顿在片中饰演2022年纽约城中一个汗流浃背的警察

In his later years, Charlton Heston was known as the Reaganite president of the National Rifle Association. But as a younger actor he was a Democrat and a civil-rights activist. He starred in three dystopian science-fiction films, the messages of which are positively left-wing. They all warn of the catastrophic damage that humans can do to the environment.

查尔顿·赫斯顿晚年，人们只知道他是全国步枪协会的里根式主席。然而，曾作为一名年青演员的他，是一个民主党，同时也是民权活动家。他在三部反乌托邦的科幻电影中担任主角，这几部电影均传递出明确的左翼观点。他们都警告人类可能给环境带来灾难性破坏。

The first and best of these was “Planet of the Apes” (1968), which ended (spoiler alert) with the revelation that civilisation had been destroyed in a nuclear war. In “The Omega Man” (1971), civilisation had been wiped out again, this time by biological warfare. In “Soylent Green”—released 50 years ago, in 1973—civilisation is hanging on, but the situation is precarious.

三部中的第一部、也是最棒的一部是《人猿星球》（1986），故事以（剧透预警）人类文明在一次核战中灭亡为结局。在电影《最后一个人》（1971）中，人类文明又一次遭到灭绝，这次是由于生物战。在50年前上映的《超世纪谍杀案》（1973）中，人类文明虽得以延续，但是情况十分危险。

Pollution and overpopulation have ravaged the natural world, resources are scarce and climate change has brought on “a heatwave all year long”. The unnerving part is that the story is set in 2022. It is impossible to watch the film today without weighing up how accurate its predictions turned out to be.

污染和人口过剩肆虐自然界，资源匮乏，气候变化带来“持续全年的热浪”。令人不安的事，这部电影的背景设定在2022年。如今再看这部电影，人们很难品味不到电影的预测是多么的准确。

Loosely based on “Make Room! Make Room!”, a novel of 1966 by Harry Harrison, “Soylent Green” is a melancholy conspiracy thriller written by Stanley Greenberg and directed by Richard Fleischer. Heston stars as Robert Thorn, a hard-bitten police detective in New York who shares a cluttered flat with his sweet old assistant, played by Edward G. Robinson in his final role (he died before the film was released).

《超世纪谍杀案》大致是基于哈里·哈里森（Harry Harrison）于1966年写的小说《腾出空间！腾出空间！》改编而成。这部由斯坦利·格林伯格（Stanley Greenberg）编剧、理查德·弗莱舍（Richard Fleischer）导演的电影是一部令人伤感的阴谋惊悚片。赫斯顿在剧中饰演纽约一名硬派的警探罗伯特·索恩（Robert Thorn），他跟自己和蔼的老助手（Edward G. Robinson饰演）挤在一间公寓里，这也是爱德华·罗宾逊最后最后扮演的角色。（电影上映前他就去世了）

A murder investigation takes Thorn to a plutocrat’s spacious apartment in a fortress-like complex, where he encounters items that, in the world of the movie, are luxuries: soap, fresh apples and, most excitingly of all, air conditioning. “We’ll make it cold like winter used to be,” coos the apartment’s live-in courtesan (Leigh Taylor-Young). The inquiry also takes Thorn towards the truth about Soylent Green, a tasteless foodstuff. It is supposedly made from plankton, but, given that the oceans have been despoiled, it is not.

为了调查一宗谋杀案，索恩来到一位财阀城堡似的建筑群中一间偌大的公寓中，在电影世界中，他在那所见到的全是奢侈品：肥皂、新鲜的苹果，还有最令人兴奋的空调。“我们能让这里像冬天一样冷”，住在公寓中的花魁（利·泰勒-杨饰演）轻声道。调查将索恩引向索伊伦特格林（一种无味食品）的真相。据说这是由浮游生物做成的，但是鉴于海洋已经遭到破坏，所以并不是。

Considering it was set five decades in the future, “Soylent Green” is remarkably unfuturistic. There are no spaceships or laser guns, just miserable figures shuffling around a dingy brown metropolis. For most people around the world, city life in 2022 was nicer than it is in the film-makers’ imagination, the pandemic notwithstanding. But some elements are too close to reality for comfort: the enmeshing of politics and big business, the separation of rich and poor, and the clashes between the masses and the heavily armed riot police. The relentless, sticky heat may be familiar to modern viewers, too.

The film’s most daringly cynical touch is that New York’s citizens are resigned to the way things are. Nobody thinks that nature might one day recover. Nobody rebels against the corrupt system. Indeed, Thorn himself is happy to be a part of it, as long as he can supplement his income by accepting a few bribes and pilfering a few treats from crime scenes. In its own way, the complacency of the populace in “Soylent Green” is scarier than the mutants in “The Omega Man” and the tyrannical gorillas in “Planet of the Apes”.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The future