* Illustration: Matias Vigliano * I love the movies. I love the environment. I love movies about the environment, especially ecological-disaster flicks—oh, the hilarity! From the atomic-paranoia-fueled Pandora's boxes of the '50s (Them!, Godzilla) and the hapless "nature's revenge" flicks of the Love Canal era (The Swarm, Piranha) to the budget-busting disaster epic (2004's The Day After Tomorrow, best remembered for a scene in which Climate Change implacably pursues Jake Gyllenhaal), commercial attempts to put a high-minded, hortatory gloss on schlocky genre cinema are always good for a guffaw. My favorite would have to be Frogs, the 1972 "thriller" whose trailer intoned, "Suppose nature gave a war ... and everybody came?" (That's good, but it should've read, "Suppose Hollywood covered aging Oscar-winner Ray Milland in confused, nonunion amphibians ... and everybody laughed?")
The dopiness of so-called ecotainment—environmentally virtuous entertainment—rises in direct proportion to its message-mongering. In this way, it's no different from the Christian inspirational flick. To be sure, many classics prey upon our ecological anxieties—The Birds, Jaws, and Jurassic Park come to mind. But these highlight the indomitable and inscrutable brutality of nature, not the need for better stewardship of a beleaguered planet. They're the children of Moby-Dick, not Silent Spring. Even in these jittery, post-Inconvenient Truth days of rising seas, killer storms, and T. Boone Pickens TV spots, blockbuster-scale ecotainment is still the poseur spawn of Towering Inferno-style disaster matinee and Silkwood-esque docudrama. The subject matter simply resists Hollywood idiocy: Environmental problems are complex and holistic, whereas mainstream movies thrive on conspicuous good/evil dichotomies that flatter our binary human minds. To oversimplify: Nature is Gore-ville; blockbusters are Bush country.
That said, explicit, heart-on-sleeve ecothemes are leaking into mainstream movies. Let us avert our eyes from the Superfund site that was M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening (the crazed Claritin commercial Hitchcock never made) to consider the Seuss-meets-Kubrick trashscapes of Wall-E, the pissed-off pagan nature-spirits of Hellboy II, and the water-hoarding, greenwashing Bond villain in Quantum of Solace. And there are more storms brewing: The Thaw, about a deadly parasite unleashed by melting polar ice caps; Strays, which strands four Americans in a clicking-hot Russian nuke-opolis; Creature From the Black Lagoon, reimagined as a dying-ocean parable; and 2012, a world-ender from disaster-master Roland Emmerich, director of The Day After Tomorrow. As the headlines worsen and vague notions of fear and collective guilt harden into urgent, palpable catastrophes, the greenocalypse, as a premise, looks more and more muscular.
Before this beefed-up, camp-free ecotrend can continue, however, it must pass its ultimate legitimacy test: Keanu Reeves. He's starring in a Category 5 environmentally minded remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still—an antiwar-message movie from 1951—invading theaters in December. Fox has been "trying to remake this since the original," says screenwriter David Scarpa. "Ray Bradbury did a draft in 1980." Now that humankind has finally generated a worthy successor to nuclear Armageddon, the studio has pulled the trigger. Keanu plays Klaatu, the wise alien who, in the original, landed in DC with his chaperone, the chrome killbot Gort, and began counseling against atomic brinkmanship with the USSR. This time, he's an unearthly Earth-firster who chides our planet-raping ways—and backs up his critique with lethal action (Gort again—but updated).
Retributive genocide—pretty ballsy stuff. But it risks putting capital-M Message ahead of thrills and dramatic fireworks—a hazard of ecotainment that Scarpa calls the "on-the-nose thing." "People don't want to be preached to about the environment," he says. "We tried to avoid having our alien looking out over the garbage in the lake and crying a silent tear, like the Indian in that '70s commercial." In the original, Klaatu delivers a climactic speech to the world's top scientists. Scarpa scrapped it: "I don't think audiences today are willing to tolerate that."
Even if the environmental threat still hasn't achieved silver-screen credibility on a par with nuclear devastation or even terrorist attack, it's gaining. And that gives me hope. Hope that the species may survive to make bad movies about tomorrow's man-created crises. Hope that we'll someday remake The Day After Tomorrow as a campy commentary on our catastrophic overabundance of fresh air and bluebirds.
Email scott_brown@wired.com.
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