Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. The Climate Crisis as Satire.

 

In 2006 we considered Idiocracy over-the-top satire. Today some people think it's a documentary.

Today we're churning out movies that satirize climate breakdown. 

Which films kept you entertained over the holidays? Was it Silent Night, the sweary festive Britcom starring Keira Knightley? The courtroom drama Naked Singularity, with John Boyega as a crusading lawyer? Or did you watch Leonardo DiCaprio as a dorky astronomer in Don’t Look Up, a slapstick political satire? Whichever it was, I hope you poured yourself a large one, because none of those films are quite as light as they seem. All take place in the shadow of imminent Armageddon.

That’s right: the end of the world is nigh, and it’s no longer the preserve of megabudget disaster movies or bleak survivalist thrillers. These days the looming obliteration of our species can just as readily form the backdrop to some governmental mockery or a boozy country-house drama.

According to the Wikipedia page listing “apocalyptic films”, there were more additions to the genre in the past decade than the previous two combined. In the last year alone the destruction of our planet has been either realised or threatened in sci-fi extravaganzas, family tearjerkers and chirpy animated romps. This year will bring more of the same: slated for TV are two cheerless visions of post-viral dystopia, The Last of Us and Station Eleven, as well as the Ronseal-titled Extinction. At the cinema, we’ll get the big-screen pageantry of Moonfall from disaster impresario Roland Emmerich, and a Noah Baumbach adaptation of Don DeLillo’s eco-fiasco novel White Noise.

A new movie genre - kitchen-sink nihilism.

Maybe this trend for quietly apocalypse-adjacent storytelling is to be expected in an era when the real-world headlines tell of survival bunkers, fire tornadoes and doomsday glaciers. Dr Strangelove’s breakneck bomb-ride was the response to a world where nuclear decimation could arrive at any moment; maybe this new mode of restraint reflects a reality where the unthinkable seems to be unfolding bit by bit, a matter of glum inevitability. Adam McKay’s climate-change satire Don’t Look Up takes its lead from Kubrick’s movie, invoking the apocalypse as an act of ridicule towards a complacent political class. But six decades on, the tone has shifted from anarchic glee to resigned exasperation. “Maybe the destruction of the entire planet isn’t supposed to be fun,” says Jennifer Lawrence’s scientist. “Maybe it’s supposed to be unsettling.”

It’s a credo that unites this current crop of films, which all provoke angst rather than excitement, defeatism rather than hope. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a shrug. Or as Arnold Schwarzenegger grumbles in End of Days, while the scenario of the title closes in: “We have some real serious problems here – and we’re not solving any of them!” And when it comes to the annihilation of humankind, there’s a man who knows what he’s talking about.