Whether you believe that art imitates life or life imitates art, it often seems as if the 21st Century is imitating a Hollywood blockbuster. At the moment, as many of us have observed, the current situation seems to be echoing Contagion and 28 Days Later. Before that, the climate crisis – with its news reports about hurricanes, tidal waves and wildfires – felt like every mega-budget movie about a world-shaking apocalypse.
The strange thing is, though, that despite the uneasy connection between environmental news reports and apocalyptic films, climate change is mentioned in hardly any of them. On the big screen, the threats to civilisation as we know it are war (The Book of Eli; Mad Max: Fury Road; Alita: Battle Angel), disease (Zombieland; World War Z; Contagion; Inferno), drugs that were intended to counteract disease (I Am Legend; Rise of the Planet of the Apes), alien invasions (Oblivion; Edge of Tomorrow; A Quiet Place), and demons (This Is The End). Clearly, this glut of doom-laden entertainment was responding to our anxieties about the state of the planet. But the idea that our carbon footprints might have something to do with it doesn’t get a look-in.
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In The Core (2003), the Earth’s core has stopped rotating, and nuclear explosions are required to jump start it. In Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), it’s the Sun which is almost defunct, and again, nuclear explosions are what’s needed to bring it back to life. In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), the problem is crop blights. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), it’s infertility. Then there is Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), which the Korean director made a few years before the Oscar-winning Parasite. His dystopian action movie is set during a new ice age, but rather than being brought about by climate change per se, the catastrophe was caused by a misguided attempt to reverse it by “dispersing CW7 into the upper levels of the atmosphere”.