10 Films to Inspire Your Inner Environmental Superhero

10 Films to Inspire Your Inner Environmental Superhero:

In one vision of the distant future, after global warming has melted the ice caps and left the planet covered in water, Kevin Costner grows fish gills, lives on a trimaran, and battles pirates as he sails in search of the legend of “Dryland.”

Waterworld is a constant reminder of the risks associated with making environmental movies. In 1994, it was the most expensive film ever, and the heart of the story was a future ravaged by global warming. It didn’t help that the film was terrible, but Waterworld continues to color the way we think about environmental movies.

Waterworld highlights a problem for environmental cinema: Discussions tend to focus on a fairly narrow range of films, often defined primarily by celebrity documentaries (An Inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour), the occasional message movie (Promised Land), disaster/post-apocalyptic movies (The Day After Tomorrow), and Wall-E. For most viewers, the world of environmental movies is small.