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Fri, 17th Apr 2020 19:17:00 |
Why does cinema ignore climate change? |
Apocalyptic films feature disease, war or alien invasions – but there's one thing they almost always avoid. Nicholas Barber asks why Hollywood is still so squeamish about the real environmental crisis.
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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