An earlier post made me think of this. If you look at Soylent Green from a slightly different perspective, the ending takes on a whole new meaning, with Heston as the bad guy. I mean, we're all supposed to go with our gut reaction, and simply be horrified at the idea of cannibalism being forced on people without their knowledge. However, the world is overpopulated, agriculture is more or less dead, the oceans are dead, and normal food sources are virtually non-existant. The one thing there is a lot of is people. In such an extreme situation, would it be practical to simply bury or incinerate the dead? No. In fact, it would be wasteful. The government is at least processing them into something reasonably palatable, and people are fortunate to have no idea what they're eating and no idea what is happening to their loved ones. Heston, in the end, is interfering with the only thing keeping the population alive.
Anyway, what are some examples of heroes who, in spite of taking the moral high ground, are actually causing a lot of trouble, when you think about it? This should be easy - the 70s and 90s are full of them.
Man's Best Friend. Serious "Designated Hero Syndrome" there.
The Lethal Weapon series. I love the first one - one of my all time favories - but Rigs and Murtaugh cause SO MUCH DAMAGE that they would be out of a job in a heartbeat.
Okay, sure, my examples are no where near as good as yours, but, hey, this is me.
Sure I could go with that... but it still dosent explain the 150 dollar Stawberries, or the meat in the freezer... The Shower, or even Heston's character is taking items from the dead man.
There is food out there, and in Soylent Green, only the rich gets the real food, and the poor gets to eat themselves...
How about ALIEN and ALIENS? Ripley does everything in her power to destroy what could be one of the most fascinating scientific discoveries of all time.
The Burgomaster wrote:
> How about ALIEN and ALIENS? Ripley does everything in her power
> to destroy what could be one of the most fascinating scientific
> discoveries of all time.]
Because they were trying to kill her. I don't think she overreacted, really.
It's reasonable to think that somebody would have a few plants somewhere. A cow would be a little more difficult to believe. I wouldn't want to think of the price of beef. But, if the strawberries cost $150 (thirty years ago that was even more impressive), it's because there aren't enough to provide more than a treat for a handful of rich people. The demand has greatly exceeded the supply of real food. Even if everything is rationed equally, people are going to starve without soylent green.
How about The Omen trilogy. Again and again characters are trying to kill the Anti-Christ, which the Bible clearly states will be kicked off the Big Blue Marble by Christ/God himself. Who are these people really fighting?
I agree with "Lethal Weapon" Joe Pesci's character was a bit of a dweeb, but they were down right vicious to him.
Agree with the "Designated Hero" status in "Man's Best Friend" Similar in nature is Peter Benchley's "The Beast"
It's amazing what you can get away with if you're the hero.
Everything that happened in Jurassic Park is John Hammond's fault. Think he got any jail time?
Grumpy Guy wrote:
"The Burgomaster wrote:
> How about ALIEN and ALIENS? Ripley does everything in her power
> to destroy what could be one of the most fascinating scientific
> discoveries of all time.]
Because they were trying to kill her. I don't think she overreacted, really."
I agree that she did not overreact. However, she did place her own pitiful, meaningless existence ahead of the greater good of scientific advancement that could have benefited all of humanity. (That selfish imbecile!)
Humm...nice upgrade on the sacasim module, Burgomaster. I like it.
Does the Soylent Green context mean people would be graded just like beef? What would be the gradeing marks? IA for Arnold S. and J. Lo, and 3D for Carrot Top and Seth Green?
True, there ain't much the population could do about the situation.. Guess life at the dinner table would consist of "Eat your Soylent Green! Don't you know people are starving in Europe who would love to have the food....oh, never mind. It IS the people in Europe!"
James Bond. If he wasn't working for the good guys he's be a philandering homocidal sociopath.
I always thought that in Nightmare on Elmstreet 4 that if Kristen had just let Freddy kill her right from the beginning no one else in that movie would have died! She pulled Kinkaid and Joey into her dream so they died.. they would have been okay if it weren't for her ho ass! Then when Kristen finally decided to die she pulls Alice in and gives her her stupid dream powers so Alice can make everyone else die!! That was the worst! Alice and Kristen were the villains in that movie! Freddy was just doing what came natural! and he sucked face with that cute girl with the big boobs and that made him MY hero!
As for eating people! I think would do it! yep! If people were raised on farms for slaughter like cows and made into tasty people-steaks and people-burgers I'd eat them! OKay, maybe raised on happy farms and die of natural causes and then be made into tasty people-meats! It would be easier if I didn't know it was people though. Maybe I'd change my mind if they actually did it. I think that in Soylent Green they should have had people farms! It would have been far more gruesome and much more appealing than people wafers! They could have had big people-meat feasts and everyone would have been happy to eat real food! and people could have donated their bodies to people-meat factories when they died!
See?! NOW they can remake Soylent Green because my version IS better!
love colleen
> How about ALIEN and ALIENS? Ripley does everything in her power
> to destroy what could be one of the most fascinating scientific
> discoveries of all time.]
"Because they were trying to kill her. I don't think she overreacted, really."
"I agree that she did not overreact. However, she did place her own pitiful, meaningless existence ahead of the greater good of scientific advancement that could have benefited all of humanity. (That selfish imbecile!)"
Lately the line "They can BILL me!" has haunted me....
regards,
Apostic
In Re-Animator Dan Cain wound up getting a lot of innocent people killed. Okay maybe not a lot but still by helping West (and convincing himself that it was to save lives) he got the dean and his fiance killed.
Also in Terror Firmer some guy (noone really cares who he is) extinguishes the killer when he/she/it was on fire (safety to people)and thus gets Jerry stabbed in the head and I think Moose get stabbed too.
In Story of Ricky Ricky is all messed up . He almost kills a guy and then cries about his family for cripes sake. However the last thing he does is let all of the prisoners out of jail. Now I know that they were treated badly by the warden but they were in jail for a reason.
The problem with eating people, as presented in Lucifer's Hammer (excellent book for those not familiar, check it out), is that eating ourselves is a major disease vector because we're all susceptible to the germs we're all susceptible too. You'd have to cook the hell out of that meat.
If those meddling science jerks brought an alien back to Earth, it would wipe out the whole human race. Think about what happened to the shake 'n' bake colony on LV246.
And John Hammond didn't get any jail time in Jurassic Park because he was eaten by a pack of compsygnathus.
Brother R
>You'd have to cook the hell out of that meat.
Or irradiate it.
It's strange that this was posted, because I was actually thinking of posting something similar about The Matrix.
We're automatically supposed to side with neo and the rebels because being used by machines is wrong, but is the Matrix such a bad thing? Ok, maybe it's not so great as-is, but what if users could customize their own personal part of the Matrix to whatever they wanted? In the first movie, agent Smith tells Morpheus that people weren't fooled by the first version of the Matrix because it was too perfect, but that's only because they were TRYING to fool them and people started wondering what was wrong with 'reality'. What if they simply told the people, "You're in a computer simulation, you have the power to change your world and make it anything you like."? Then you would have no disease, no crippling injuries, no need to work unless you wanted to, and the machines would take care of you. When you think about it, the Matrix is an act of consideration by the machines, since they could just give everyone a lobotomy leaving them brain dead but alive.
What are Neo and the others going to wake people up to? Ruined cities, starvation, disease...
If the machines had just offered to hook people up to a system where they could have the equivalent of the Star Trek holodeck 24 hours a day for the rest of their lives, I think they would have had more volunteers than they knew what to do with.
Apropos The Matrix, I'd nominate the Keanu Reeves character in "Speed". He causes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage when a paltry few million would have paid off the ransom and saved the city from raising taxes by 1000% to repair things.
And don't get me started on John Cusack's character in "Con Air" ...
What about Ahnold in "Collateral damage"? Just because he needs t ohave revenge he causes the deaths of the character by John Leguizamo, then causes a whole colombian village to be bombed, and ends up causing the deaths of a couple FBI agents and security guards in the third act of the movie. And is he sent to jail? No! He is even allowed to keep the terrorists' child!
About the eating humans part, I am with Paquita. I mean, not the whole human-farm stuff, but the fact that I wouldn't think twice about eating a human entrecote if the alternative was starvation. After all, its just meat.
Yeah, apart from the rioters scooped up by the trucks, everyone eaten in Soylent Green either died of natural causes or voluntary euthanasia. No murder or people farming there. Small comfort, I know, but we are talking about extreme circumstances.
Funny, I had thought about the disease factor myself (Niven is one of my favourite authors). I suppose whatever is required to reduce a human body to little green wafers will probably kill anything in it. I do kind of wonder whether, with people eating people who ate people, and no balance in the diet, whether the nutritional value and health of the population would gradually decline. Consider also that the calories are being burned, but there are few crops to store the sun's energy in new food.
Of course, that brings us to the question of whether the system in Soylent Green is sustainable. Definitely not. I think they're just prolonging the inevitable at that point. That's what is really horrifying about the ending - things are beyond repair, and extinction (or at least the collapse of civilization) is just around the corner.
Yeah, eventually they're either going to have to start breeding human foodstock, or just go extinct. That movie was really depressing. They did dystopia right.
Brother R