We are rapidly becoming the all-star cast of the biggest disaster movie of all time, and tragically it’s a global success. Towering infernos blaze over Canada, the Canaries and Rhodes, Bangladesh, China and even northern England have had their own devastating Poseidon adventures while the whole world continues to reel in the socioeconomic chaos of the Covid contagion and in fear of an H1N1 outbreak. Only the dramatic effects are no longer computer-generated, they are real, and people are really dying.
I went to the Odeon in the 1970s and was terrified and wowed by the disaster film genre. Since the late 1980s I’ve been watching the real world’s climate effects department ramp up its protests to our wholesale inactivity and disregard for the science that says, with increasing accuracy, that humanity is facing Armageddon. But there’s been another competing genre, the conspiracy/disinformation movie, the creepy corrupt B-movies released, not by Hollywood, but by big oil, not X-rated at the multiplex but woven insidiously into our lives as extras in this catastrophe… and the repeats, re-streams, re-runs orchestrated by those fuelling the flames.
So it’s time to rebel, or just moan and die: that’s your choice. The best rebels rely on good intel and need a secure base founded on the facts, so I suggest before you climb aboard your TIE fighters you watch and digest the following films. Because for all its frippery and Marvellous nonsense, some more valuable parts of the movie industry are trying to tell us the truth.
If I could add a movie to the list here it would be Roland Emmerich’s 1996 film Independence Day, starring Will Smith and Bill Pullman. I know, flag-waving gung-ho Americana, but it does have one significant message to address our current and greatest ever crisis. When the threat is tangible, an alien invasion, the whole world unites to address the bloody mess it’s in. All nations, all religions, all politics, all peoples rise to the challenge of preserving humanity. Well, climate breakdown isn’t an alien threat – it’s real, and we are one species on one planet with one massive problem and one last chance to sort it out. And Bruce Willis and Steve McQueen are sadly no longer available so you had all better find a bit of Smith/Pullman and start digging in for the fight for human life on Earth.
Chris Packham (Damon Gameau, 2019)
‘A bluff, likable figure’: Damon Gameau.
Photograph: Prod DB/Alamy
Australian actor turned film-maker Damon Gameau is a bluff, likable figure presenting himself as a rare optimist in a field of doomsayers: addressed to his four-year-old daughter, this decidedly upbeat documentary offers a constructive manifesto for combating climate change by the titular near-future deadline. He’s no academic, which is the point: a lot of his advice comes down to common sense, as he advocates reducing meat eating (without insisting on total veganism) and envisions a future without car ownership. But it’s helpful and energising to watch a film of such ideas, by someone who’s also just muddling along.
Best for: Accessible, everyday prompts on how to start being more eco-conscious.
(Shaunak Sen, 2022)
The title of Indian film-maker Shaunak Sen’s exquisite, Oscar-nominated documentary comes from a much-treasured quote by the late mother of its human subjects, Delhi-based brothers and conservationists Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud: “One shouldn’t differentiate between all that breathes.” It’s the guiding principle for a film that doesn’t address specific aspects of climate change, instead surveying all aspects of an ailing, polluted urban ecosystem – filtered through the makeshift bird sanctuary run by Nadeem and Mohammad, where all life has equal value, and there’s no hierarchy of issues to address. Help and heal what you can, the film tells us.
Best for: Instilling a holistic view of a crisis we can’t afford to compartmentalise.
Q&A
Film-maker Shaunak Sen
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The Calcutta-born film-maker Shaunak Sen was Oscar-nominated for his 2022 documentary All That Breathes, about two brothers who run a bird hospital in North Delhi for injured black kites. It was Sen’s second feature after City of Sleep, which explored homelessness and sleep in Delhi.
Why did you decide to make the film?
When you live in Delhi, you’re always obsessing about the air because you’re surrounded by this dystopic, grey sensorium. I was looking for people who have a profound relationship with the skies, when I came upon these two brothers, Nadeem and Saud. Their work is singular, and the way they speak about urban ecology is really poetic. That small, grubby basement [where they treat birds] took on metaphorical ways of representing a broader zeitgeist that everybody in the world is grappling with.
What impact has the film had?
There was a tremendous media spotlight in the runup to the Oscars. And our producers decided to financially support the bird hospital for a year and hopefully more.
Did making the film change you?
It broadened something in me, in the sense that I spent three years looking up. I want to commit myself to making films that have something to do with the planetary problem. It’s infected me with a zeal for the natural.
Essential books on the climate crisis?
Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement is a fabulous book. He approaches the delirium that prevents us [from dealing with climate change] with great urgency.
Killian Fox
Thank you for your feedback.
(Adam McKay, 2021)
Leonardo DiCaprio in Don’t Look Up.
Photograph: Netflix/AP
Critics weren’t enamoured of Adam McKay’s Netflix hit – a big, blunt, broadly comic allegory for the world coming to an end and nobody but the scientists being bothered – but it connected with the public, even spurring Twitter spats in which detractors were labelled climate change deniers. The film works by disguising the issues a bit: global warming here takes the form of a massive meteor hurtling towards Earth, but its manic depiction of social and political division in the face of the crisis does ring true. Naturally, Leonardo DiCaprio, a prominent environmental activist in his spare time, takes the role of the ignored, exasperated climate expert.
Best for: Starting the conversation with someone who’d rather be entertained first, educated second.
(Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)
Wolf girl San in Princess Mononoke.
Photograph: Moviestore/Shutterstock
Made in 1997, anime master Hayao Miyazaki’s dazzling historical war fantasy was rather ahead of its time in its stark warning over the consequences of humans plundering the Earth’s natural resources. It’s framed not as a tidy fable but as an epic battle between the residents of Irontown – whose expansions and thriving firearms industry mean the deforestation of the surrounding landscape – and the spiritual guardians of the woods, eventually arguing for compromise and balance between the two. It’s rousing, thoughtful and suitable for all but very small children (who may prefer the less artful but more benign animation FernGully on a similar ecological theme).
Best for: Parents looking to seed awareness in their children of climate change and our role in it.
(Alejandro Loayza Grisi, 2022)
A Bolivian farmer in Utama.
Nominated for a grand jury prize at last year’s Sundance festival, Bolivian director Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s debut film is a simple, lyrical drama about rural hardship and devotion that doesn’t declare its message in all-caps – instead trusting viewers to surmise the environmental threat in its parched, poetic imagery. But it’s foremost a story about people, as an elderly farming couple face being uprooted from the Bolivian highlands by severe drought, urged to relocate to the city by their well-meaning grandson. Loayza Grisi makes a heartfelt case against not only the natural destruction wrought by climate change, but its gradual eroding of indigenous cultures and communities.
Best for: Bringing an intimate, tear-jerking human dimension to a vast global subject.
(Phie Ambo, 2021)
Danish protesters demanding climate action.
Photograph: Marie Hald
Greta Thunberg may be the universally recognised face of youthful opposition to climate change – and duly got her own dedicated documentary portrait, Nathan Grossman’s I Am Greta, in 2020 – but this stirring doc from Denmark is a heartening reminder that she’s far from a lone voice in her generation. Phie Ambo chronicles the sizeable movement of young Danish people who took to the streets successfully to pressurise the government into new, bolder climate policies: the title refers to a pledge targeting a 70% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030. Whether they’ll meet it, nobody knows, but it’s a strong reminder that activism yields results.
Best for: Bolstering jaded adults’ faith in the next generation, and children’s in their own.