March 24th, 2008
1. Batman & Robin
There are so many things wrong with Batman & Robin—the descent into cheesy Adam West-era camp, the chaotic lighting scheme, nipples on the Bat-suit—that mixed messages about the environment don't immediately come to mind. And even as supervillains go, Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy couldn't compete with the sublime poetic insipidness of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze. Still, Poison Ivy has always fancied herself as an environmental crusader, with blood that flows with plant toxins, a body that emanates natural pheromones, and vines springing out of her like Georgia kudzu. She says, "I am Nature's arm. Her spirit. Her will." Yet as Mother Nature's self-proclaimed enforcer, she protects the environment with a fanaticism that one could only call Ingrid Newkirk-esque. She's all for going green, but her eco-villain wants to destroy all humanity to make it happen.
2. Bio-Dome
Is it wrong to confess, ever so sheepishly, that Bio-Dome has a solid premise? Setting a pair of yahoos loose in a hermetically sealed, self-sustaining dome populated by snooty, tightwad scientists… It sounds like a Marx brothers movie, and it was probably just what the nation needed after witnessing the melodrama stirred up by the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona. But since those yahoos are Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin, and the dome is a structure they've mistaken for the mall, the film fills the precious synthetic atmosphere with toxic gas, and uses every opportunity to thumb its nose at the earnest, highly educated bark-eaters who would rather save the planet than party hearty. After this unclean dumb-and-dumber duo trash the place through flagrant wastefulness and a secret kegger that gets out of control, they finally see the error of their ways and complete the experiment. But by then, the last-ditch pro-environment message is superceded by the audience's desire to kill the messengers.
3. Captain Planet
In 1990, a humble billionaire named Ted Turner had a simple dream: to promote environmentalism among young people via a green-mulleted, Earth-loving superhero who dressed like he was auditioning for a slot in the Ambiguously Gay Duo. The public grudgingly tolerated Turner's misbegotten concoction, first in Captain Planet And The Planeteers, then in The New Adventures Of Captain Planet, and finally in Marvel's Captain Planet comics. Eventually, though, they moved on to less preachy/crappy superheroes. After a thoroughly undistinguished run, Captain Planet was finally put out of its misery, though first, the Captain and his planeteers tussled with Hitler. According to Wikipedia, Turner is currently in talks about a possible live-action Captain Planet movie. Be afraid. Very afraid.
4. The Day After Tomorrow
Plenty of sincere, worthy films have been made about the threats of global warming and critical climate change. This isn't one of them. This is the one that mines oceans of bathos out of a wide-eyed, bald, leukemia-stricken child trapped in a powered-down, freezing hospital after a global climate shift dumps America into an Ice Age. And the one where Dennis Quaid plays a dad who gets a buddy killed so he can cross America's frozen wastes to stand uselessly by the side of his son, Jake Gyllenhaal. And the one where Gyllenhaal is literally chased down a hallway by killer cold. The Day After Tomorrow isn't scary because of its could-this-happen-to-us? vision of an America destroyed by its own environmental apathy, it's scary because its vision of the future is endlessly mawkish and ridiculous. It'd be worth giving up industry and going back to the land just to ensure that no one has to have their heartstrings plucked by a wide-eyed, diseased child evoking Peter Pan ever again.
5. Melissa Etheridge, "Wake Up"
What will destroy the world's glaciers and icecaps first: global warming, or seismic destabilization caused by Melissa Etheridge's garish singing? Accompanying the rational, firm Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Etheridge's tune "I Need To Wake Up" hammers in the untapped "being complacent is just like being asleep, man!" metaphor. That "I"—as opposed to the world's energy-burning population in general—says everything about the comical arrogance of celebrities and hacky songwriters who think clichés take on greater power in their own hellish windpipes. Perhaps to supply the vividness that Etheridge's lyrics lack, the song's video breaks up her drunken-mime-with-guitar posturing with cataclysmic stats and images. For example: "Polar bears are drowning."
6. Ferngully: The Last Rainforest
Early-'90s eco-chic was at its height when 20th Century Fox picked up the independently produced cartoon Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, an aggressively marketed, singularly unpleasant tale of wood sprites fighting off lumberjacks. It's one thing to protest wanton destruction of eco-systems, but Ferngully is so life-obsessed that its final battle is against the very spirit of destruction: a creature known as Hexxus. How the rainforest would look in 10 years without any kind of death at the end of the life cycle is a question the filmmakers fail to address. Also ignored: how much petroleum it took to make all those unsold Ferngully toys. (And whether we really want to live in an environment that allows a Robin Williams-voiced rapping bat to survive.)
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