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The Most Ridiculous Movies About Climate Change
Here’s my hot five, feel free to add yours in the comments won’t you?
The Day After Tomorrow – Global warming causes New York to freeze and CGI wolves to run amok in New Jersey. I forget, is Matthew Broderick in this one, or do I have it confused with some other Roland Emmerich POS?
Day of the Animals – Ozone depletion causes mountain lions and birds to join forces and attack campers for reasons that are not entirely or even remotely clear. Also, a very stupid man is killed by rattlesnakes and a shirtless Leslie Neilson wrestles a bear.
Snowpiercer – Global warming (or, more precisely, a transnational scheme to reverse global warming) causes the world to… freeze. Why do filmmakers so often go the deep-freeze route? Is it because the idea of a world 100 degrees colder is more cinematic than a world 4 degrees warmer? Anyway, for some reason, after global warming froze the world, the survivors… um… built a giant train. Yeah, that’s it, they built a giant train. And the train constantly runs around the world, for some reason, and also there is class struggle. Also, children have to be tortured to keep the train moving because that’s what passes for a subtle metaphor in Cinema these days. (Led to an interesting conspiracy theory, though.)
Birdemic: Shock and Terror – Climate Change causes birds to turn into low-budget CGI and dive-bomb people at gas stations and also spit acid somehow. Also, spruce bark beetles cause teeny tiny forest fires, somehow. Humanity’s only hope lies with a software salesman who can’t pronounce “Solar panels.” (Soar pommels.)
An Inconvenient Truth – Remember when all the glaciers in the world melted, rising sea levels sank Florida and the Maldives, and polar bears became extinct? Neither do I. None of it happened. What *did* happen is Al Gore won an Oscar, a Nobel Peace Prize, and amassed a nine-figure fortune. Oh, and he built a $9 million mansion on a part of the California coast he claimed would be underwater.
Oh, and An Inconvenient Truth inspired Birdemic. So, there’s that.
Published in Entertainment
The book behind Snowpiercer pre-dates (1982) the global warming hoax. It is actually close to the previous global cooling hoax. Read about it here. I don’t remember if the movie explicitly changes it to global warming, since my brain was stuck on the stupidity of the premise while watching. Update: IMDB says: In a future where a failed climate-change experiment has killed all life except for the lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, a new class system emerges.
That bird movie scene is hilarious. 10 year-olds with cell phones do a better job making movies.
Amazon has the latest season of Shark Week available for two dollars. It’s a testament to the regularity of invasive politics and bad philosophy in modern nature documentaries that two dollars seems more than it is worth.
The photography keeps getting better. The narration and direction keeps getting worse.
Highlander 2 is panned by almost everyone, but it had some interesting environmental concerns if my faulty memory is correct. I remember that the plot feature the ozone hole, because that was the going concern at the time, and people were living in huge domed cities for protection. Someone discovered that the hole had repaired itself and it was safe to open the domes, but others didn’t want that to happen. Maybe. I only saw once, when it came out.
Have any of you see Crawl, the new thriller about CGI alligators in a flooded Florida home? It is apparently set during a hurricane. They could leave it at that, but I bet there is something about global warming making hurricanes worse somehow.
Anyway, like Deep Blue Sea, the premise seems just barely tolerable enough that I would watch it for free on Prime or Netflix.
The number of sci fi tv shows that use global warming as a plot point are nearly uncountable. Hollywood treats it as a given.
One of my favorite bad movies. Right up there with Anaconda
One thing I find extremely annoying is that you can’t even watch a nice little nature documentary anymore without global warming being injected.
“Look at these amazing sea creatures! Look at this fascinating wildlife! . . . But they will all die unless you start coughing up trillions of dollars of your tax money and giving it to us!”
One of my favorite bad movies. Right up there with Anaconda
Frogs, starring Ray Milland. seemed a little more about pollution and such, but the wildlife intent on revenge was interesting.
Little known fact: The birds of Hitchcock fame turned against humans because the diner stopped putting out bread crust.
Little known fact: this film was based on an actual book I remember our store carried when I worked as Barnes and Noble back in the early 00s. It was shelved in a category call (I think) “Speculative”, which was a catch-all category where conspiracy books, books on really far out archaeology, books on aliens, and sundry other rather disreputable books were. Basically it was the Alex Jones / Art Bell part of the store, which was fitting in this case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Global_Superstorm
There was a knock-off version of this book too – had a lurid cover and boldly predicted the exact year of this disaster. I think it was 2008? Don’t really remember now. But I do remember Art Bell’s book.
Oh… I have to watch this…
But wait, there’s more! Now enjoy Birdemic: Shock and Terror with RiffTrax treatment. It is available free now with Amazon Prime.
Both “Day of the Animals” and “Birdemic: Shock and Terror” are in the rotation with humorous commentary at RiffTrax’s Twitch channel.
http://www.twitch.tv/rifftrax
Are there any movies that don’t mention it?
Better visuals.
He kept the real estate values from going up too much.
AI wasn’t about climate change, or at least that wasn’t the main story line or whatever. But near the end it has New York underwater and then later all that water frozen, in apparent defiance of physics. I think humans were extinct because. But what do I know?
I don’t watch a lot of movies and that is one I regret subjecting myself to.
Has there ever been a movie worth watching where the trailer starts with “In a future where…” or “In a world where…”?
That clip may be the awfulist thing I’ve ever seen.
How quickly do we forget Charlton Heston and the great Solar Crisis!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z8iii7lIHk
Its one of those great hollywood bombs that got quietly released in November or something.
If you want some entertainment, there is a spoof of The Blue Planet on Netflix called The Round Planet. There’s only a few episodes, but it’s hilarious.
Wasn’t that the pay-off in Logan’s Run: That the population explosion disaster being predicted in the 60s and early 70s never happened but the policies that created the rigorously population controlled society Logan lives in are maintained even though the elite know better?
You’re right. I hadn’t seen Logan’s Run that way but it makes sense.
I always thought it was about the perils of swimming in The Water Gardens.
The pastor and the organist were both out this week. The replacement pastor did fine. The organist was replaced with a guitar player.
None of the hymns were old standards. One of them was presented to the congregation by the lyrics alone.
How do you confuse a guitar player?
Put sheet music in front of him.
Works on most bassists, too. Wrote the bassist.
This was not an attempt to hijack the thread. I aimed at the PIT and I missed.
Waterworld would be up there for me. Wall-E gets a pass though, because it’s awesome.