The Most Remarkable Environmental Disaster Films That Depict the Limits to Growth

Godzilla eats a train car in a scene from Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956).Image Getty

Is there a more desolate novel about the future of humanity imaginable than The RoadThe route), the masterpiece by American author Cormac McCarthy, a book that appeared in 2006 and appears on most lists of the best novels of this century? A book in which the world after an undefined apocalypse is sketched in merciless prose. Take that opening alone, with that first sentence, whose echo runs through the entire book. ‘When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.’ The nights darker than ever, the days increasingly gray, ‘like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world’ – as if an eye disease was slowly hiding the world from view.

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in the film adaptation of The Road.  Image

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee in the film adaptation of The Road.

What could possibly go wrong with a film adaptation? But The Road by John Hillcoat from 2009 held up McCarthy’s radical vision admirably, thanks to the camera work of Javier Aguirresarobe and the father-and-son roles of Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee (now nominated for an Oscar for his role in The Power of the Dog† About the final scene of The Roadfilm and book, you can speculate endlessly, but the film seemed to let in a little more light.

McCarthy leaves the catastrophe that hit the planet unnamed, but that didn’t change the fact The Guardian put the book in his top five of ‘best novels about climate change’. McCarthy had no activist agenda, but got his first ideas for the book when he visited the Texas town of El Paso with his son. He imagined what it would look like in a hundred years and that he would walk there with his son ‘among burning hills’. In any case, it is clear that in The Road the current climate system has disappeared.

In that regard, The Road same starting position as Finch, a recent post-apocalyptic movie starring Tom Hanks. Hanks plays robot expert Finch Weinberg, who is joined by his dog Goodyear and his robot assistant Dewey on an overheated Earth. Remarkably enough, the film remains completely outside the polarized discussion about climate change, especially in the US. In Finch the change is not man-made, but a massive burst of solar energy that destroyed the ozone layer ten years before the events of the film. We can, of course, call this cosmic intervention a metaphor, which, like the meteor in Don’t Look Up from Netflix, actually stands for the way humans treat themselves and the planet. Or we could point to the Hollywood habit of keeping large audience films as apolitical as possible.

Tom Hanks as robot expert Finch Weinberg in the movie Finch.  Image

Tom Hanks as robot expert Finch Weinberg in the movie Finch.

The limits to growth, the Club of Rome’s alarming climate report (1972), was not quite the catalyst for American popular culture to depict the end times. The atomic bomb and the nuclear age already provided the Japanese in the 1950s godzillamovies, less than ten years after the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The same applies to the Netherlands. Just under ten years before Kees en Kooten and Wim de Bie coined the term ‘doom thinking’ in 1980, And now to bed by Annie MG Schmidt one of the most popular musicals in the Netherlands. At 350 performances in the large halls of the country, the public heard the song evening in, evening out the leading players Frans Halsema and Jenny Arean Running is no longer possible sing, perhaps the darkest cabaret song in our history. Flight is no longer possible, makes no sense / And on earth the last bird sings in the last spring / Here in Holland the last butterfly dies on the very last flower. Moreover, the song makes brilliant use of the rhyming words ‘defoliation countries’ and ‘tourist beaches’. These ‘limits to growth’ came as no surprise.

Science fiction cult classic Soylent Green from 1973 has a reputation for being truly a Report of the Club of Rome-film is, since 40 million people live in the New York of the film, there is green smog in the streets and the last butterfly is long dead. Then we forget for a moment that the film is based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison from 1966. Pauline Kleijer recently wrote an ode to the film in this newspaper, which would take place in the distant future of 2022. ‘The film is sweaty, dirty and nasty, as it was in the 1970s’, she writes, especially because that also applied to New York in 1973 itself. The central quote comes from the character Sol (the last role of the legendary Edward G. Robinson), who is so ancient that he still remembers fresh air. ‘People have never been good. But the world used to be better.’

The best ecological disaster movies

Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972)

This science fiction classic was the directorial debut of the recently deceased special-effects wizard Douglas Trumbull (1942-2022), who directed the Star Gate for Stanley Kubrick. 2001: A Space Odyssey designed. In a future where plant life on Earth threatens to die out, gigantic greenhouses are sent into space. Unforgettable final scene in which the last life is provided by a robot with a dented watering can in a greenhouse that floats into the deep universe.

Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell in Silent Running.  Image

Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell in Silent Running.

Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)

The robot out Silent Running was undoubtedly a major influence on this wonderful Pixar animated film, arguably the greatest masterpiece of the San Francisco studio. Especially the silent overture, in which we follow robot Wall-E in his endless task to clean up the polluted and desolate planet, is one of the most impressive animation scenes in film history. In the second part we get to know the greatest sin of mankind: indifference.

  Wall-E, the robot on caterpillars from the movie of the same name.  Image

Wall-E, the robot on caterpillars from the movie of the same name.

Mad Max 2 – The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981)

Only in this masterful second part (after a low budget sensation Mad Max from 1979) we are told how we ended up in this post-apocalyptic chaos: a world war, after the oil supplies were exhausted. Filming in the Australian outback, Miller created a desolate post-punk look that would become the style handbook of any post-apocalyptic film from then on. On this planet, oil is the new gold and a life is worthless.

Mel Gibson in Mad Max 2 – The Road Warrior.  Image

Mel Gibson in Mad Max 2 – The Road Warrior.

The Day After Tomorrow (Roland Emmerich, 2004)

Emmerich puts the survival of the earth at risk in all his films. How, it doesn’t matter. His best disaster movie is The Day After Tomorrow based on the book The Coming Global Superstorm from 1999, in which the climate reaches a kind of tipping point, sea currents change and a new ice age arrives, but then the turbo version. People keep themselves alive by stoking up books in the New York Public Library – so much for the importance of science and literature in the future.

Jake Gyllenhaal as Sam Hall in The Day After Tomorrow.  Image

Jake Gyllenhaal as Sam Hall in The Day After Tomorrow.

Don’t Look Up (Adam McKay, 2021)

Two astronomers discover a comet that is hurtling towards Earth and will put an end to all life there. They try every possible way to attract attention, but the US media is too busy with the celebrity cult and the US president and her crazy son just want to know what it means for the polls. ‘Thick wood cuts planks’ metaphor about the inability of humanity to focus on the climate crisis. The endless discussion about the film seemed to be living proof of that.

Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up.  Image

Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence in Don’t Look Up.

50 years after Limits to growth

Fifty years ago, the Club of Rome released an authoritative report, Limits to Growth, warning of environmental pollution and resource depletion. That concern was widely shared and yet the Earth is still under threat. What lessons can still be drawn from the report? Is limiting growth enough? How do young people pick up the spirit of Rome? And how were movies influenced by the bleak conclusions?

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