![]() ![]() ![]() The Ken Miles death in Ford v Ferrari was justifiably tweaked to deliver a narrative payoff. Following the Ken Miles death, the car was renamed Ford Mk IV and was heavily modified. The J-car testing was halted before resuming with Miles at the wheel. Miles was the second test driver to be killed while testing a J-car in the span of five months, with the previous driver, Walt Hansgen, being killed before Miles. Christian Bale's Ford v Ferrari character is killed in the ensuing fire, resulting in the Ken Miles death scene. (For more inspiration - BAFTA, and my agency Futerra, launched Planet Placement, a guide for the tv and film industry on how their work can help raise awareness about climate change.In the film, rather than ejecting Ken Miles after an unexplained fault, his Ford test car crashes after experiencing brake failure. It’s time for a climate movie in which we don’t all die. It’s the most compelling, unputdownable story of facing into the solutions that I’ve ever come across.įor once, I’d like to cheer the solutions of climate change, rather than darkly laugh at our response to it. I hope Netflix is planning to follow Don’t Look Up with a big-budget adaptation of Kim Stanley Robinson’s astonishing The Ministry For The Future novel. That’s what we need for climate change, story after story of courage and compassion in the face of our climate monster. Of course, we do have a familiar movie blueprint for heroes overcoming terrible odds – from the brutalised Dumbledore’s Army gathering in Harry Potter, all the ‘free peoples’ preparing to battle Sauron’s army in Lord of the Rings and perhaps even the superheroes stepping through those swirly portals to back up Captain America in Endgame. I wish we had even one montage like that for climate action! It’s like a mini masterclass for kids on how we change things for the better. There’s a media frenzy of coverage, protest marches, government pronouncements, consumer action and then a global fishing treaty. I adore the ending of the penguiney children’s movie Happy Feet – after people discover the plight of the starving penguins, an emotionally soaring montage shows in just a few frames exactly how we could go about solving over-fishing. I’ve written before about how amazing that story could be. How We Fixed It stories - not the Deus Ex Machina quick fixes – but the story of real, messy, challenging and unexpected ways to solve and recover from climate change. ![]() But the experts at Yale have watched even more and I recommend their brilliant list of cli-fi movies here if you’d like to explore the genre.īut, there’s one typology of climate movie that is notably missing even though audiences yearn for answers…Ĩ. Perhaps the Avengers will eventually take on climate change? I’ve always been a little surprised there aren’t more of these. In Geostorm a satellite network conveniently manages the climate (until it doesn’t) and in 2067 a future ravaged by climate change invents time travel to a far future that might not be. Even the alien Predators are worried that global warming will change human DNA. In the 2008 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, alien Keanu Reeves is sent to protect Earth’s fragile biosphere from humanity. Deus Ex Machina – are films in which tech, magic, aliens or superheroes fix the planet. But it’s First Reformed that explores a very tangible and terrifying climate response – nihilism and violence – in an exquisite film.ħ. Snowpiercer is an excellent thriller set aboard a single train that survived a failed geo-engineering attempt. Oops, Wrong Solution! – I’ve written before about Thanos from the Avengers movies and his terrible Malthusian mistake, similarly, Downsizing takes a bad solution to resource crunch (make people smaller so they consume less) but turns it into a reasonable comedy. Whilst the moral of these stories is laudable, seeking to ignite a more biophilic mindset, I do wonder if there’s also a touch of misandry in them.Ħ. Evil Humans V Good Nature – Avatar, Fern Gully, Princess Mononoke and even Frozen II all lean into the truism of people being bad for everything else on the planet. From The Matrix to The Terminator these man-made monster stories are easy analogies for climate change, and I expect as our climate anxiety grows we’ll see more of them.ĥ. Man-Made Monsters – as climate parables go, Frankenstein is the story that most resembles much of our climate discourse – man makes monster, then monster destroys man. In Tomorrowland this potential is given a rather dull outing, but Back To The Future nails it by powering the DeLorean with organic waste in a mass produced ‘Mr Fusion’ machine.Ĥ. The starship Enterprise doesn’t run on petrol. Super-Fuel Utopias – almost every space opera assumes humanity will truly advance once we dump oil as fuel. ![]()
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