If you think environmental films are all about penguins and Al Gore, think again
By Anthony Kaufman
Special to MSN Movies
Earth Day may have launched on April 22, 1970, but it's only over the last couple years that the globe is really getting its due. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, some freakishly snowless winters, Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" and two big movies about little penguins ("March of the Penguins," "Happy Feet"), Earth Day doesn't feel like the poor, young cousin of Arbor Day anymore, but a worldwide phenomenon. The unofficial holiday even got its very own shout-out, of sorts, in 2003's "The Core," a silly, big-budget sci-fi epic about the slowing of the earth's spin cycle, whose opening shot rests on the sign: "Green World Day."
Whatever Hollywood calls it, there's one thing for sure: Environmentalism and entertainment have always had a close relationship. Al Gore may have emerged as the undisputed patron saint of "climate crisis," but he's not the first environmental advocate to use the movies as a way to spread the gospel of green.
Over the years, both Hollywood and independent films have taken up environmental themes, often becoming political lightning rods and, occasionally, leading to grass roots action. As Dennis Quaid's intrepid paleo-meteorologist Jack Hall told millions of moviegoers in America's biggest global-warming spectacle "The Day After Tomorrow," "I think we are on the verge of a major climate shift!" And a cultural one, too.
If movies can't exactly change government policy, they can help foment seismic shifts in public opinion. Who would have ever expected the once stiff-as-cardboard Mr. Gore to upstage Leonardo DiCaprio at the 2007 Academy Awards? Or animated blockbusters aimed at the next generation to directly engage the politics of urban sprawl and over-fishing, as with "Over the Hedge" and "Happy Feet"? Or small movies like "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and "Fast Food Nation" to pressure auto giants and fast-food industries to launch counter-offensive campaigns to ward off negative publicity?
For this Earth Day, why not celebrate with the environmentally consciousness-raising power of the movies? Whether it is eco-horror films, animal welfare adventures or chemical paranoid thrillers, those who care about the planet can honor it anytime, either on DVD or at the multiplex, with a myriad of engaging choices.
Don't Go in the Water: Environmental Terror
Ever since American nuclear weapons tests created a giant Tokyo-decimating lizard in Ishiro Honda's 1954 classic "Godzilla," the eco-horror movie has been a favorite environmental evergreen. And, the memorable Japanese monster flick has never looked more relevant than in a newly restored, uncut version that appeared on DVD last year. The revived "Godzilla" emerges not simply as a kitschy horror movie with bad dubbing, but a horrific metaphor about the return of nuclear apocalypse just a decade after the bombing of Hiroshima. "If we continue testing H-bombs," reads a coda in the new edition, "another Godzilla will appear."
Indeed, while a wrathful nature has attacked us spontaneously and inexplicably over the years ("Volcano," "Dante's Peak," "Armageddon," "Deep Impact"), it's humankind's contribution to environmentally catastrophic events and creatures that arguably has the deeper impact. "The Day After Tomorrow," which lays the blame for climate cataclysm on government and corporate carelessness, spurred headlines the world over ("Global Warming Ignites Tempers, Even in a Movie"; "Apocalypse Soon? No, But This Movie (and Democrats) Hope You'll Think So"). But there's one problem with the movie: It's not very good, thanks to a silly melodramatic father-son plot and over-the-top politics.
For a better thrill-ride and a more cogent critique of government environmental policy and mismanagement, "The Host," a new Korean monster movie, takes us back to Godzilla territory with a hair-raising tale of what can go wrong when American scientists dump chemicals in your river. Funny and smart, spine-tingling and subversive, "The Host" subtly realizes a polluting society's worst fears in the form of a gigantic, bloodthirsty, amphibious fiend. (The famous tagline for "Jaws" -- "don't go in the water" -- takes on a whole new meaning here.) The highest grossing film in Korean box office history, "The Host," unfortunately, failed to capture U.S. audiences upon its release this year, but it's one of the most entertaining environmental wakeup calls in years.
Another little-seen, but effective eco-monster indie, 2001's "Wendigo," gives shape to a Native American spirit -- half-man, half-deer -- that terrorizes a family of New Yorkers on vacation for the weekend. While nothing is so explicit, "Wendigo" eerily confronts the clash between civilization and nature, man and beast.
It's a conflict that's at the heart of many films, from the most basic wild, wild westerns; to Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's 1976 Oscar-winning masterpiece "Dersu Uzala"; to the sublime and surreal cinema of German auteur Werner Herzog, who often pits obsessed men ("Aguirre: Wrath of God," "Fitzcarraldo," "Cobra Verde") against the primeval power of the natural world. And man always loses. In Herzog's recently celebrated documentary "Grizzly Man," he shows that the monster we must heed need not be a supernatural one. It turns out that, for Timothy Treadwell, the majestic grizzly bear is not man's best friend. (The animal ends up eating the real-life naturalist, along with his girlfriend.) While not exactly eco-terror, "Grizzly Man" nevertheless shows there is a limit to man's encroachment on nature and, at some point, we will pay the price.
Man Was in the Forest: Good Nature, Bad People
Animals aren't all monstrous creatures bent on vengeance. For as many films exist that depict nature's dark side, there are a number of worthy movies that evince their environmentalism by showing the beauty of the beast, the grandeur of its habitat and the evil that men do to ruin it. What is "King Kong," both the original 1933 version and Peter Jackson's 2005 epic, but a plea for animal welfare? PETA couldn't have come up with a better moment to make us sympathize with the plight of nature's creations than Naomi Watts staring longingly into the eyes of the giant dying ape atop the Empire State Building?
With all the Old Yellers, Free Willys and Lassies, most animal movies veer into hackneyed melodrama. Yet, there are a few that stand out for steering clear of anthropomorphic sentimentality: "Gorillas in the Mist," the mostly engrossing 1988 film about Dian Fossey's crusade to save mountain gorillas (starring a steely Sigourney Weaver); the harrowing animated 1978 British adaptation of "Watership Down," where bunnies are driven from their habitat by humankind to face more horrific dangers in the wild; and, the lesser-known Disney film, 1983's "Never Cry Wolf," which follows a researcher in search of Arctic gray wolves that are allegedly causing the extinction of caribou.
Directed by Carroll Ballard (better known for "The Black Stallion"), "Never Cry Wolf" has a family-friendly touch, yet never sugarcoats its subject matter. In a cold, forbidding tundra, dancing penguins are nowhere to be seen -- just the beautiful and mysterious wolves who have been misjudged. It turns out they are not the ferocious caribou killers; instead, callous hunters are to be blamed. As Bambi's mother once said: "Man was in the forest."
In John Boorman's majestic 1985 feature "The Emerald Forest," man isn't just in the forest, he's obliterating it mile by mile. Set in the Brazilian jungles, the film recounts the story of a man working on a dam project whose 7-year-old son is abducted by a Native tribe. When he discovers the boy 10 years later, he finds the he is no longer suited for civilization. With gorgeous cinematography of the Brazilian rainforests and its Amazonian people, the movie offers a sumptuous ode to the environment -- and a harsh condemnation of the modern world that destroys it.
Soylent Green Is People: The Enemy Is Us
If both eco-horror and wildlife movies explore the tensions between man and nature, a number of films reflect environmental struggles between humankind and the unsustainable world that we've created. In the late '70s and early '80s, American moviegoers experienced a deluge of paranoid thrillers and conspiracy pictures, including the dystopian ecological sci-fi flick "Soylent Green" (1973), and two groundbreaking Hollywood movies about the dangers of unchecked nuclear power: "The China Syndrome" (1979) and "Silkwood" (1983).
While "Soylent Green" is a guilty pleasure for its cheesy '70s future-shock look and Charlton Heston's exaggerated performance, the movie paints a devastating portrait of the dangers of the "greenhouse effect" (marking perhaps the first time the words were ever uttered on the big-screen). Set in an undernourished and overcrowded future (New York population: 40 million!), the film depicts on an overheated world where all natural resources have been destroyed. "Soylent Green," a genetically engineeered food source -- surprise, surprise -- turns out not to be the miracle substance the Soylent corporation has been pitching. And, like subsequent environmental thrillers, the movie lays its chief blame on the evil corporation and the callous suits who care only for profit.
The bad guys in "The China Syndome," for example, are the high-level bureacrats and executives of the nuclear power industry, whose lax safety regulations endanger human lives. With Jack Lemmon as a control room technician, Jane Fonda as a television journalist and Michael Douglas as her renegade cameraman, these environmental whistleblowers join forces to expose a corrupt nuclear industry that is more interested in expansion than safety. Famously released in theaters just two weeks before the nuclear accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, "The China Syndome" proved itself to be a prescient suspense drama about the anxieties of nuclear energy -- anxieties that are no less relevant today.
Director Mike Nichols' stirring "Silkwood" offers an even more intimate examination of the psychological and physical fallout from nuclear power. Based on the real-life story of Karen Silkwood (a brassy, breakout performance by Meryl Streep), the film chronicles Karen's work at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Plutonium Recycling Facility in Oklahoma, where unsatisfactory safety conditions lead her and some of her co-workers to be contaminated by radioactive materials. The film not only addresses the dangers of nuclear energy, but the conflicted relationships, labor struggles and internal battles that were integrally related to Karen's fight -- and her eventual demise. She was mysteriously killed in a car accident on the way to meet a New York Times reporter in 1974.
Some 20 years later, Hollywood returned to similar stories of corrupt companies, the impact of their environmental neglect, and the crusaders who fought to right their wrongs. In "A Civil Action" (1998), based on John Grisham's novel, John Travolta plays an egotistical lawyer redeemed through his quest on behalf of the residents of Woburn, Massachusetts, who've been poisoned by a contaminated river. Released just two years later, "Erin Brockovich" stars Julia Roberts in an Oscar-winning performance as the intrepid activist and single mother of three who exposes a cover-up of the pollution of a small California town's water supply by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company.
Before these two reality-based Hollywood stories, there was Todd Haynes' "Safe" (1995), an entirely fictional, but arguably far more haunting portrait of environmental toxicity. In a stunningly frigid performance, Julianne Moore plays Carol White, a California housewife who suddenly finds herself sneezing, coughing and suffering nosebleeds for no apparent reason. What is to blame? The everyday chemicals that make her sleek, beautiful home clean? The prevailing haze of pollution that hangs over Los Angeles? Moore's delicate Carol thinks so. To escape her environmental illness, she joins a New Age community, whose closed-off, insular world implies another sort of stifling entrapment where breathing freely is not any easier.
An unnerving movie that offers no easy targets and no easy answers, "Safe" suggests that the best thing can we do on Earth Day is not to stay inside and discuss climate change with like-minded ecological supporters or doomsayers (or watch movies about them), but, rather, get off our butts -- away from our computers -- and enjoy the air, water, and grass -- while we still can.
Sound off on Earth Day movies. Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com or visit our message board.
movies.msn.com |
