Climate Corner: No movies on a dead planet

Mar 1, 2025

Aaron Dunbar

editorial@newsandsentinel.com

This weekend marks the occasion of the 97th annual Academy Awards. This year’s Oscars come on the heels of the January wildfires that devastated much of Los Angeles, scorching nearly 57,000 acres of Southern California. Among the untold victims of these deadly conflagrations, which were made an estimated 35% more likely due to climate change, was the widely acclaimed and visionary filmmaker David Lynch.

Lynch, a lifelong smoker from the age of eight, announced in August of last year that he’d been diagnosed with emphysema and had become largely housebound, requiring supplemental oxygen to perform even the most basic of tasks. Being forced to evacuate during the L.A. fires ultimately proved fatal for Lynch, robbing us of one of the most iconic and influential directors of his era. As one article published in The Vermont Cynic aptly puts it: “David Lynch’s death represents the intersection of the two major addictions of the twentieth century: tobacco and fossil fuels.”

Not so coincidentally, the brood of vipers once selling cigarettes to 8-year-old David Lynch is the same one currently brainwashing today’s children into believing that climate change is a hoax (see the 2014 documentary “Merchants of Doubt.”)

These events got me thinking about the subject of climate change as it’s depicted in film. Despite the misguided conservative notion of Hollywood as some devious purveyor of leftwing propaganda, I generally find myself quite disappointed with the scant supply of popular media attempting to meaningfully explore the most urgent crisis of our times.

Still, there are a handful of decent climate films I’ve managed to stumble across through the years, so I thought I’d share my abbreviated thoughts on a few that have made a lasting impact on me.

* Snowpiercer (2013), directed by Bong Joon-ho

From the Korean filmmaker who directed 2020 Best Picture winner Parasite (also, arguably, an excellent climate film in its own right), Snowpiercer is a dystopian scifi tale set a mere six years into the future. Humanity, in its attempt to restore the balance from catastrophic global warming, has unwittingly unleashed a new Ice Age on the planet via a doomed attempt at geoengineering. The few remaining survivors of this disaster are housed aboard a train whose tracks encircle the Earth, and whose passengers are sorted into different cars by adherence to a rigid class structure. The film presents a relentlessly bleak and brutal vision of the future, wherein environmental desecration intersects with a hellish society of total elite domination- one which we presently find ourselves knee-deep in the process of creating.

* Don’t Look Up (2021), directed by Adam McKay

Often described as “Dr. Strangelove for the climate crisis,” this Oscar nominated film depicts global society’s widespread failure to respond to the impact of an approaching comet, which threatens to destroy the Earth. An obvious metaphor for climate change, the film has been dismissed by some critics as too heavy-handed or on-the-nose. Curious, then, that our entire society should still be acting identically to the one depicted in the film.

* Four Souls of Coyote (2023), directed by Aron Gauder

A gorgeously hand-drawn animated feature of the kind that seldom gets produced these days, Four Souls of Coyote is initially set in the present day, depicting a group of Indigenous land protectors as they attempt to halt an oil pipeline being constructed on their ancestral lands. From here the film leaps back for most of its runtime to explore humanity’s larger, fraught relationship with nature through the telling of ancient Indigenous Creation stories.

There are some potential issues with representation in this film, being a Hungarian production centered around Native American folklore, that I do want to make a point of acknowledging. That said, I find the visuals and underlying themes of this movie to be deeply impactful.

* Take Shelter (2011), directed by Jeff Nichols

Having loved this film for years, I only recently had the belated epiphany that it could, in fact, be considered a climate change movie at all.

Take Shelter tells the story of Curtis LaForche, an Ohio construction worker with a family history of schizophrenia, who begins suffering from vivid nightmares and hallucinations of biblical storms that threaten him and his family. He begins to work obsessively at building an elaborate storm shelter in his backyard, convinced that these visions will soon come to fruition. His panicked doomsaying soon alienates members of his close-knit community and puts the security of his wife and hearing impaired daughter at risk. Powerfully acted by the incomparable Michael Shannon, this film essentially explores the premise: what if God told Noah to build the ark, and everyone, including himself, thought he was insane for doing so?

There’s little doubt in my mind that many of our readers must surely view folks like myself with a disdain similar to LaForche’s own community, with his seemingly hysterical warnings of a coming apocalypse, and very little in the way of tangible proof he can offer for his claims. This sort of evangelizing on behalf of the climate puts one in a strange position of wanting to be proven both right and wrong at the same time. Obviously, the accusation that one is delusional makes one all the more eager to vindicate oneself, and yet I can safely say that most climate activists would love nothing more than to be proven incorrect, if it meant being able to somehow spare the world from the coming storm that awaits it.

* First Reformed (2017), directed by Paul Schrader

A favorite film of mine, and arguably the darkest one on this list. First Reformed features a harrowing performance by Ethan Hawke as Reverend Ernst Toller, the troubled minister of a small Dutch Reformed church. One Sunday, a pregnant parishioner asks Toller to provide counseling to her husband, a radical environmentalist caught in the grip of hopelessness over climate change, who believes that it’s wrong of them to be bringing a child into a doomed world.

Toller’s own demons leave him highly susceptible to the influence of the conversation that ensues. The crisis of faith he’s been experiencing becomes sharply accentuated by climate despair, and his psychological state grows increasingly disturbed as his personal circumstances worsen.

Toller is further vexed upon realizing that the Albany megachurch bankrolling his tiny congregation is heavily funded by a major industrial polluter, a conflict of interests that prevents the church from meaningfully addressing the issue of climate change. This puts me in direct mind of a comment I once received from a reader some years back, about how the preacher at her church refused to discuss climate change and its spiritual implications, for fear of offending pipeline workers present in her congregation. This is, I think, the exact sort of moral cowardice that would have Jesus Christ of Nazareth flipping over tables in outrage.

Regardless of one’s religious affiliation, this film asks a question that will haunt the viewer long after the credits have rolled: “Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?”

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Aaron Dunbar is a member of Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action