Love affair with disaster movies

In her influential essay ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ (1965), the American writer and intellectual Susan Sontag argued that in the post-World War II era, modern society had become obsessed with the idea of disaster, as seen in the proliferation of science fiction and disaster films. She writes that these films are concerned with “the aesthetics of destruction” and “the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc”. For Sontag, this obsession with disaster mirrored a sense of anxiety and unease about the potential for catastrophic events in the nuclear age. The films serve as a way of processing and coming to terms with these fears.

Sontag’s ideas remind us that popular genre films continue to articulate contemporary social concerns; in other words, they “reflect” the times in which they are made. The argument goes, for instance, that 1950s American science-fiction films like The Thing from Another World (1951), Them! (1954) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) might on a surface level be telling stories of alien invasion or rampaging ants, but they are also mounting a far deeper interrogation of specific contemporaneous fears such as communism, nuclear power and technological anxiety.

Films about the end of the world have always been big business. They trade on our fears, astound us with their state-of-the-art special effects and remind us not just of the fragility of our home planet, but of ourselves.We think of the post-apocalyptic Mad Max (1979), where resources are scarce and society has broken down, or The Road (2009), in which a father and son struggle to survive in a world destroyed by an unspecified disaster.

Hollywood remains fascinated by threats from above and beyond.These threats usually involve aliens (Independence Day [1996], War of the Worlds [2005), A Quiet Place [2018]), meteorites (Deep Impact, Armageddon [both 1998]), solar flares (Knowing [2009]), or the Moon falling into the Earth (Moonfall [2022]). All feature recurring tropes: spectacular scenes of planetary destruction depicted in vivid CGI, a small group of people banding together to thwart an external threat, ruminations on humanity’s own contribution to its precipitous downfall, and so on. Often, much of our pleasure derives from predicting which cast members will survive or which globally famous monument will be the first to topple.

But more recently, in this era being referred to as The Anthropocene, Hollywood has turned to a different type of ‘end of the world’ film – films about environmental catastrophe triggered by humanity. One of these defining tales about an impending global apocalypse was a full-blown Hollywood disaster film – The Day After Tomorrow (2004) – which depicts the catastrophic effects of global warming, leading to a sudden onset of a new ice age and a series of extreme weather events that threaten the survival of humanity. It was directed by Roland Emmerich (who had already made Independence Day); Emmerich would go on to make 2012 (2009), another disaster film replete with volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and a global flood.

Like these earlier ‘alien invasion’ films, such films explore themes of survival, heroism, and the human condition in the face of seemingly insurmountable adversity. While The Day After Tomorrow may at times play fast and loose with scientific accuracy – the phrase “climate tipping point” from a geological perspective means decades, but in cinematic terms, that means minutes – the film succeeded in bringing anthropogenic climate change into the mainstream. Hollywood has not looked back since.

These films are representative of ‘climate fiction’, or ‘cli-fi’ - a genre of literary fiction that explores the potential impacts of climate change on a personal or a global scale. Prominent examples include Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and J. G. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere (1961).These texts don’t just raise awareness about the dangers of global warming and its consequences, but also offer possible scenarios for mitigating its effects.

Cinematic cli-fi has become progressively mainstream in recent years. Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) shows Earth as a frozen wasteland brought about by bungled attempts to counter global warming with a risky geo-engineering method. Wall-E (2008) and Avatar (2009) are two popular films that sound clear warnings about what might happen if human activities continue unchecked. And isn’t Happy Feet (2006) actually a film about climate change? Take away the dancing penguins and a much darker vision emerges, of an Antarctica surrounded by calving ice shelves, overfishing and ocean pollution.

And watch Christopher Nolan’s widely admired Interstellar (2014) again - the words ‘climate change’ are never heard, but they don’t have to be: Nolan depicts Earth as a place ravaged by dust storms, failing crops, and total biosphere collapse. Little wonder that the main thrust of the story follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole in search of a new habitable planet.

None of this is new, of course. Science fiction cinema has frequently intertwined its narratives of space travel, flying cars, and robots with broader environmental and ecological concerns. Silent Running (1972) saw Bruce Dern as a botanist, fleeing Earth and tending a giant rainforest inside a huge space freighter. Ridley Scott’s still colossally influential Blade Runner (1982) depicted a rainy urban world devoid of plants
and animals, while in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001), rising sea-levels from global warming have devasted coastal cities. And who can forget the unnerving Soylent Green (1973)? This post-apocalyptic science- fiction film is set in New York in 2022, at a time when 40 million people are enduring a permanent heat wave and a single corporation controls half of the world’s food supply. Soylent Green was released back in the early 1970s, when Greenpeace and the Gaia hypothesis were first entering the mainstream. Five decades later, it remains staggeringly prescient in its depiction of overpopulation and societal collapse. And, in light of recent estimates that as many as 50 million climate refugees may need to find new places to live by 2025, Soylent Green’s depiction of food shortages and riots have become increasingly relevant from an environmental justice perspective.

“Climate change has come to rival the dangers of nuclear war, alien invasion and terrorism in our collective cultural imagination.”Dr Ben McCann SFHEA, Associate Professor of French Studies

Sometimes, cli-fi films start out as something else entirely.The plot of Don’t Look Up (2021) revolves around two low-level astronomers who discover that a massive comet is set to collide with Earth but are met only with scepticism, denial and wilful ignorance. In fact, Don’t Look Up is not really about a comet at all. It’s about climate change. And as a film historian, I find this sustained turn towards climate anxiety in popular cinema fascinating. Perhaps those TV series about nuclear disasters (Chernobyl) or zombie outbreaks (The Walking Dead) or global pandemics (The Last of Us) aren’t really about what they seem to be. As Mark Bould’s wonderful book The Anthropocene Unconscious (2021) reminds us, what if all the stories we tell today are actually about climate change?

Documentaries have also thrived. The Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth (2008), featuring former US Vice President Al Gore, presents the science behind global warming and the environmental and political impacts it is having on the world. It played a crucial role in American culture by drawing sustained media attention to the issue of climate change and heralding a cultural shift in the way ecological concerns could be discussed. Ever since, there has been a steady flow of climate-focused documentaries - Chasing Ice (2012), which follows National Geographic photographer James Balog as he captures images of melting glaciers in the Arctic, 2040 (2019), by Australian filmmaker Damon Gameau, which explores the ways in which existing technology may allow us to transition to a more sustainable environmental future, and Thank You for the Rain (2017), which follows a Kenyan farmer who films the damages wrought by climate change to his village.

It is clear then that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, climate change has come to rival the dangers of nuclear war, alien invasion and terrorism in our collective cultural imagination. Films about those topics are still enormously popular with audiences around the world, but contemporary cinema is increasingly concerned with climate anxiety and cli-fi preoccupations.

As I write this, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) has just become the third-most watched film of all time at the global box office: that’s a film as much to do with biosphere harmony and ecosystem respect as it is with terrorism and interplanetary pillage. What these recent cli-fi films – both fact and fiction – remind us is that the “imagination of disaster” remains a thrilling, often perversely enjoyable experience, but it is becoming progressively more complicated.

In the darkened cinema, we may once have vicariously taken pleasure in seeing planets destroyed or tsunamis hitting the shore. But now, post-Katrina, post-Black Summer, post-Solomon Islands, visions of climate disaster are no longer confined to visual effects companies and laptop simulations. Today’s future-based stories have shifted focus from imaginary technologies or faraway planets. Instead, the pivotal themes are at home: the backdrop is Earth, the villain is the climate, and its weapon a never-ending surge of natural disaster.

Story by Dr Ben McCann SFHEA, Associate Professor of French Studies – and an avid film scholar and writer.