Soylent Green is landmark screen science-fiction, a riveting entertainment anda cautionary tale that holds a mirror to a tomorrow rife with ecological disaster. Working well again in the futuristic genre following Planet Of the Apes and The Omega Man, action titan Charlton Heston portrays Thorn, a detective prowling the dark streets of a polluted, overpopulated Big Apple gone rotten in 2022. He's trailing a murderer-and the trail leads to a stunning discovery.
The 1982 sequel to Airplane! is basically more of the same class-clown ironies but with a more forced feeling to the jokes. In the first film, veterans such as Peter Graves, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges were feeling their way through self-parody, and the air of experimentation was part of the fun. By this film, however, everybody knows what's up, and the assuredness of new cast members Raymond Burr, William Shatner, and Chuck Connors is almost counterproductive. Still, there's lots to laugh about.
