Movies about climate change – The Financial Express

By Reya Mehrotra

Don’t Look Up
The Netflix movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Strep, Cate Blanchett and Ariana Grande, is a commentary about climate change, which is occurring at a rapid pace. It centers on a huge comet nearing earth. Scientists take note and warn the government about the coming comet’s direction. The government ignores this warning and plans on capitalizing on it. This eventually leads the planet to mass destruction.

Tomorrow’s Day
The 2004 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal has been one of the most popular and successful films about climate change. Dennis Quaid plays Jack Hall, a climate scientist who isn’t taken seriously by UN officials because he expresses concern for the environment. His studies prove to be correct when a tornado forms, triggering a series natural disasters across the globe. Based on Whitley Strieber’s 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm, Art Bell and Art Bell created the film. The film depicts the extreme cold weather conditions and the thousands of deaths that resulted from the natural disaster. In the end, astronauts look down upon earth’s changed landscape that looks white as ice sheets spread across the northern hemisphere.

Interstellar
The 2014 post-apocalyptic movie stars Anne Hathaway (Matthew McConoughey), Jessica Chastain, Mackenzie Foy and Jessica Chastain. Christopher Nolan directs the film. The film features a group of explorers searching for a new home to save humanity from crop blights, dust storms, and other threats to its survival. The film then begins to transport humans and ensure their survival on three new planets. At its 87th Edition, the Academy Award for best visual effects was won by the film.

Waterworld
Kevin Costner stars in the 1995 film. The post-apocalyptic film is directed by Kevin Reynolds and is based on Peter Rader’s original 1986 screenplay. It takes place in the future and shows how melting polar ice caps has caused sea levels to rise dangerously and covered the land. It was the most expensive film ever made at that time. It is set in the year 2500 and shows how every continent of the world is underwater and the remnant human population lives in floating communities and have forgotten about ‘dry lands’.

Hell
Hell is a 2011 postapocalyptic film where three people, Marie, Phillip and Leonie, drive through the destruction in Germany following a climate crisis that has caused disaster. They search for water and other supplies to survive. Later, they are kidnapped and used as food by a farmer family. The survival drama centers on how the social order collapsed following the destruction of society by the climate crisis. Survivalists fight for food and supplies. The sun outside is so hot, it is dangerous to go outside.

Soylent green
Richard Fleischer’s 1973 ecologically dystopian thriller stars Charlton Heston (Leigh Taylor-Young) and Edward G Robinson. It concerns an investigation into a murder of a businessman. It also depicts a dystopian future, where the oceans are drying and there’s year-round humidity. It shows how climate change is causing overpopulation, pollution, poverty, and depletion in resources. It also talks about 2022, when climate change, overpopulation, and pollution have led to food, water, and housing shortages, and the gap between the wealthy and the poor has widened.

Aral, The Lost Sea
The 2010 documentary shows how human greed and intervention can alter climate and cause destruction. The Aral Sea, which runs between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Kazakhstan, was completely dried up in the 2010s. It is now considered one of the most devastating environmental disasters in human history. The former Soviet Union government ordered the construction of a 500-km-long canal to grow cotton. It would use a third of the water that was taken from the Amu Darya River between 1954 and 1960. The Aral Sea began drying up as a result of the increasing demand for water. Nearly all its reservoirs, wetlands, and more than 50 lakes in the area have also dried up.