2023-11-25 18:45:29
In 2004, the German director Roland Emmerich displayed in his film ‘Tomorrow’ the largest battery of natural disasters derived from climate change ever seen on a movie screen: devastating hailstorms in Tokyo, catastrophic frosts in New York and unusual blankets of snow in New Delhi. Beyond its relaxed scientific rigor and its excessive sense of spectacle, the film knew how to warn of the calamities that were coming upon us if we did not put a stop to the global warming to a public that in 2004 seemed less concerned about the climate change than due to the consequences of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which occurred only three years before.
But what in 2004 could have seemed like the implausible delirium of filmmaker who has best destroyed the Earthfrom ‘Independence Day’ (1995) to ‘Moonfall’ (2021), today it is almost documentary cinema: there is nothing more to see, in the news or on social networks, the terrifying images of weather disasters that devastate the planet with increasingly alarming frequency.
Perhaps ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is the film in which has treated climate change in a more unprejudiced waywith permission, perhaps, from its most recognized ‘exploit’, the insane ‘Geostorm’ (2018), the debut of Emmerich’s leading screenwriter, Dean Devlin, in which waves, tornadoes and hail of biblical dimensions wipe out entire cities from the face of the Earth. In any case, and always, Genre cinema has been able to reflect social crises like no other. that Humanity has had to face throughout its history, as well as its way of accepting the Apocalypse: the fear of nuclear catastrophe, the lethal effect of pandemics and, of course, the irreversible environmental disaster to which the planet is facing, be it because of the climate change or the overexploitation of its resourceswhich, in some way, would be the same.
Beyond Emmerich’s film, there are not many audiovisual fictions whose thematic axis – and main reason for being – is climate change. Another rare exception would be the painful satire ‘Don’t look up’ (Adam McKay, 2021), whose meteorite ignored by everyone is a metaphor for climate change and its derived effects. Yes, there are, however, numerous titles in which the environmental crisis is the essential context of the story, almost always from a catastrophic, dystopian, hopeless perspectivenever from the normality of everyday life, possibly the pending issue of current cinema as opposed to series: talking about the subject in a naturalistic way, as something that today we have to live and suffer: the lack of water, the extreme heat, the lack of resources and also possible solutions to the crisis. Not everything has to be tragedy and darkness.
Plant life and demographics
At the dawn of the 70s, in the midst of the explosion of the first environmental movements, the fascinating ‘Mysterious ships’ (Douglas Trumbull, 1972) took place aboard a special ship-greenhouse which preserved the only vestige of plant life after all flora had disappeared from the planet. Much more funereal and visionary it was ‘Until fate catches up with us’ (Richard Fleischer, 1973), which took place in a New York of 2022 plagued by pollution and extreme heat. The film, whose ending revealed an ominous truth about the origin of the processed food that feeds the population, was a powerful denunciation of the uncontrolled population growth on a planet with limited resources.
Already in the 80s, the classic ‘Blade runner’ (Ridley Scott, 1982) was set in a Los Angeles that, in 2019, was struggling under perpetual, dark, almost amniotic rain, with hardly any sunlight. Although it was the magnificent sequel to it, ‘Blade runner 2049’ (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) which would show a dramatic glossary of what is to come: the same rainy and overpopulated Los Angeles, protected by gigantic dikes due to rising sea levels; and San Diego converted into gigantic landfill for uncontrolled industrial waste generated by a humanity without a direction.
Being above all a beautiful love story beyond time between a little robot and his human mother, ‘A. I.: Artificial intelligence’ (Steven Spielberg, 2001), is also a serious warning about the consequences of the melting of the polar caps due to the greenhouse effect, with scenes as shocking as that of Manhattan under water with the Twin Towers still standing. Although of worlds devastated by rising seas, the definitive sample is ‘Waterworld’ (Kevin Reynolds, 1995), a blockbuster cursed by its catastrophic failure at the box office, but which foresaw, in the form of a (very vindictive) dystopian western, what a new necessarily aquatic civilization.
dying agriculture
Climate change also filters through the quantum slits of ‘Interstellar’ (Christopher Nolan, 2014). Set in 2067, Earth is barren land because of the drought and dust storms, and agriculture is dying, forcing humanity to look for an alternative planet to live on. The same as ‘Wall·E’ (Andrew Stanton, 2008), great animated fable in which the planet has become a un unhealthy and uninhabitable garbage dumpfull of toxic waste and without animal or plant life.
The list of titles that draw a deep pessimism about environmental fate of the planet is as extensive as the unease caused by assuming that, perhaps, there is no turning back. Although there can always be poetry in desolation, as in ‘IO’ (Jonathan Helpert, 2018), where two disinherited people share their intimacy on an Earth where no one lives anymore after people emigrated to Jupiter’s satellite due to an unexpected change in the composition of our atmosphere; and even disheartening laughter at a delirious end of the world, as in ‘Sharknado 5: Aletamiento global’ (Anthony C. Ferrante, 2017), in which it is climate change that causes deadly tornadoes formed by… sharks.
An eco-conscious television
The attitude of the fiction television regarding climate change was, for a time, similar to that adopted with the coronavirus: what if we pretend that it does not exist? Does anyone want to sit in front of the TV and continue observing the miseries of everyday life? The series under his influence were a minority and they generally transformed the threat into a fantastic context that could relativize the seriousness of the problem.
Luckily, in the last couple of years, more and more series of all genres have begun to take the challenge we face really seriously. Fantasy scenarios taken to the extreme still win, but even these can have a factual basis that serves to solidify its moral. In recent times, the proximity of the point of no return has ended up raising awareness among television scriptwriters of the need to include climate change in their plots. We no longer necessarily talk about fantastic series like ‘Danger zone’, a kind of viral ‘X-Files’ whose worst threats, whatever the case, were of human creation. We can talk about series as the most realistic (despite their craziness) ‘Grey’s Anatomy’whose previous season included an episode, ‘Hotter than hell’, inspired by the heat dome that had affected the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021.
Catastrophic ideas‘The fifth day’) and apocalyptic (‘The last of us’) still persist, but this more or less pessimistic view should not be the only one. From its first episodes, ‘Abbott College’ has dared to address climate change with humor and make it a natural topic of conversation between its characters. This same year, Apple TV+ released ‘A challenging future’which despite revolving around our mistreatment of the planet, allows us to dream of solutions in addition to showing nightmares.
The NGO Good Energy has proposed that by 2027 half of television and film scripts make reference to climate crisis. If not, these projects risk becoming (unintentional) science fiction: in stories about a world where everything is fine, there are no droughts or floods, it is not hot when it should be raining or the seasons follow each other in the same time frames as they have all our lives.
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