Earth Day movie playlist: 15 cautionary tales of climate disaster

The action scenes might be the best part of , so if all you know about this Kevin Costner-starring action film from 1995 is the stunt show still running at Universal Studios theme parks, we get it. Set 500 years in the future, after the polar ice cap has melted and covered the world in water, a wandering trader known only as “The Mariner” (Costner) comes across a girl (Tina Majorino) with a coded map tattooed on her back that may lead to a mythical place called “dry land.” He ends up protecting her from a gang of roving pirates led by a wildly over-the-top Dennis Hopper, who ride around on jet skis, for some reason. Oh, and their flagship is the actual , in case the pro-environmental message wasn’t already clear enough. Yeah, this movie is as bonkers as it sounds.

Pixar went to the trouble of animating a gorgeous wasteland in , which illustrates (literally and figuratively) the consequences of contaminating the Earth with so much waste that humans can’t live there anymore. Wall-E is left behind, picking up our junk, until an Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (EVE) arrives to collect a plant sample and changes everything. There’s a whole second-act plot about a massive starliner cruising around space with the lazy, blubbery remains of the human population, but once again, the secret villain at the core of it all is capitalism.

Bong Joon-ho’s is a monster movie with a message. Inspired by the true story of a mortician in Seoul who was ordered by the U.S. military to dump large quantities of formaldehyde down a drain that led directly to a river, it centers on a family terrorized by a mutated creature that emerges from the river as a result. Not only are their calls for help to the government ignored, but they become wanted criminals for escaping quarantine in an attempt to rescue a child. There’s a lot to unpack here, but the environmental commentary is fairly straightforward.

It’s never explicitly stated in that “the blight” that’s infected plant life across the globe and caused most crops to die out before the film begins is a result of climate change, but some scientists who have studied the film have suggested there may be a link. at the University of Illinois, “Perhaps in Interstellar many of the species on the planet have been wiped out not from the blight, but from the issues we face now—climate change, habitat loss, poor land management, and so on. The environment we are presented in the movie is one low in species diversity, which lacks the resilience to withstand something as simple as a plant disease.” Whether or not the disaster is man-made, the film also highlights the unfortunate human tendency towards shortsightedness. Rather than taking steps to save our planet, we’d rather just find a new one. The problem with that is, as Interstellar shows, is it’s not so easy to do.

Although the disaster that created the post-apocalyptic world of (sometimes known as Mad Max 2) was nuclear rather than climate-related, the plot revolves around the shortage of gasoline, and that crisis is at least climate adjacent. The barbaric, fuel-obsessed society that arises in its wake is a dramatic, exaggerated depiction of what might happen if we should ever run out of oil. George Miller’s futuristic dieselpunk sequel to , starring Mel Gibson in one of his most memorable roles, influenced a generation of films, and filmmakers, that came after it. And without it we wouldn’t have gotten the spectacular 2015 follow-up, .

In (as well as the subsequent TV series based on the film), the end of the world isn’t caused by global warming, but by a failed attempt to correct it, which inadvertently brings on a new ice age. What’s left of humanity lives aboard a train built by a brilliant but megalomaniacal engineer (Ed Harris) that’s designed to circumnavigate the globe until the world thaws. Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho (the only director with two films on this list) also weaves in one of his favorite recurring themes of class inequality by dividing the train into highly stratified sections. The plot follows a man named Curtis (Chris Evans) who leads a group of rebels from the tail section, where the poorest and most desperate folks live, up to the engine room, where he uncovers the shocking secrets of the train. A was produced for TNT, though the network shelved and it’s still unknown whether it will find another home.

doesn’t hit you over the head with the harsh reality of climate change, it just drops you into The Bathtub, a flooded section of the Louisiana bayou, with a little force of nature named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her father, Wink (Dwight Henry). In the midst of this intimate portrait of a troubled family, we see images of glaciers calving, releasing prehistoric beasts called aurochs from the ice where they’ve been trapped for eons. Are these events actually happening, or is it all a product of Hushpuppy’s rich imagination? The film never commits either way, but it doesn’t need to. The true focus here is the fragile balance of life in a community that could be wiped out after one strong rainstorm, and the stubborn residents who are determined to make the most of every day.

Adam McKay’s 2021 satire gets an honorary spot on this list even though it’s technically not about climate change, but a comet headed for Earth that threatens to end civilization as we know it. It’s a pretty obvious allegory, though. The film’s commentary on the systemic obstacles standing in the way of progress, even as the reality of a mass extinction event is staring us right in the face, applies either way. It’s so much easier to deny that the end of the world is imminent than to accept that there’s something you can do about it. But if the likes of J-Law, Leo, Meryl, Cate, and Timothée can’t convince you, well, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?”