The five best movies about climate change
Many of us turn to movies to briefly escape the horrors of the modern world. At the top of that list is climate change—an existential crisis already wreaking havoc on the planet and one that may well destroy it outright. Humans are the cause, yet driven by greed, we are barrelling toward the worst-case scenario, with reversing course now completely out of reach.
Movies have dealt with ecological crises since the beginning of the 20th century, though the tenor changed significantly in the 1970s when environmental activism filtered into the mainstream. Films like Silent Running highlighted the implications of a planet ravaged by humanity and started a new sub-genre of science fiction that has only grown more relevant.
There are, of course, countless documentaries covering the crisis. Davis Guggenheim’s surprise 2006 hit An Inconvenient Truth is one of the most influential documentaries of the 21st century and helped reinvigorate the movement, but while documentaries have the power to show us the evidence, fictional feature films have the power to extrapolate and find truths that either haven’t happened yet or are too nebulous to explore in a non-fictional format.
These five films address climate change from creative, distinctly cinematic perspectives. They range from dramas that deal with the crisis peripherally to disaster movies that attack it head-on. They aren’t escapist, but they do help us see the existential threat in a new light that helps break the agonising loop of anxiety and helplessness. They also happen to be great cinema.
The five best movies about climate change:
The End We Start From (Mahalia Belo, 2023)
Although it pays homage to the broader disaster movie category, The End We Start From is one of the most potent and unnerving depictions of the climate crisis, bringing the issue to the heart of London. Jodie Comer stars as a pregnant woman whose water breaks just as the city sinks under a catastrophic flood. As society breaks down around her and she is separated from her partner, she flees to an island close to Scotland with her new baby.
There is something particularly unsettling about a disaster movie that feels as though it could be set in the present, and director Mahalia Belo eschews the usual thrills and melodrama for a much more understated tone. It’s a film that explores how an individual can navigate the fallout of a harrowing climate crisis. Do you cut yourself off from the world and search for a sheltered utopia, or do you return to what remains of your home and try to rebuild? Although this film received mixed reviews when it was released, it will almost certainly age better than most disaster movies.
Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazake, 1997)
Hayao Miyazaki has often highlighted the importance of the environment in his films, including in his masterpiece Spirited Away, but Princess Mononoke is his most thematically direct movie in that regard. It follows a prince named Ashitaka who travels to find a cure for a curse he sustained while fighting a demon. On his journey, he finds himself in the middle of a battle between the forest gods and Irontown, a mining colony that has ravaged its natural surroundings.
The film is a family-friendly, visually gorgeous exploration of the tension between nature and technology that doesn’t boil the issue down to a simple binary. It takes a surprisingly nuanced and compassionate approach to both sides, humanising the struggle between the characters and suggesting that there is more complexity than mere good and evil. Released in the ‘90s, it’s a remarkably prescient film from the Japanese master that remains just as relevant and spellbinding today as it was nearly three decades ago.
How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Daniel Goldhaber, 2022)
There aren’t many people who would happily refer to themselves as terrorists, but in Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the group of young protagonists wear the term like a badge of honour. Based on Andreas Malm’s nonfiction book of the same name, which posited that active sabotage is the only logical form of activism to combat a crisis of this magnitude, it follows a group of eight young activists in West Texas who decide to blow up a pipeline in the name of self-defence.
At a time when the Just Stop Oil movement grabs headlines for being a relatively harmless nuisance by throwing soup at paintings and showering athletes with confetti, How to Blow Up a Pipeline takes a much more provocative approach that gets right to the philosophical crux of environmental activism. When the planet is rapidly burning because of human-caused climate change, has pacifism become an impotent and even counterproductive approach?
Luckily, Goldhaber understood that these polemical musings couldn’t sustain an entire film, so he ensured that the movie was also an edge-of-your-seat thriller.
First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)
There are many films that explore men of the cloth who face a crisis of faith, but First Reformed takes a whole new perspective. It centres on Ethan Hawke as a Protestant minister who has grown so despondent over personal and global tragedy that he can no longer pray. Instead, he spends his alone time drinking whiskey and writing in a journal. One of the complexities that he faces is a pregnant woman whose husband, an environmental activist, has grown increasingly nihilistic about the state of the world.
As Hawke’s character faces a void of silence where he used to hear God, he is confronted with brute force by the horrors of the material world. Unfiltered, it proves to be an almost unbearable weight. The film feels like a horror movie, though there are no jump scares or serial killers. It’s a dark exploration of an identity crisis sparked by the most pressing of modern concerns, and it is one of the most accurate and moving cinematic encapsulations of the 21st century to date.
Afire (Christian Petzold, 2023)
German director Christian Petzold takes what might be the most quietly transgressive and revealing approach to the climate crisis of any filmmaker. Afire follows an egotistical author named Leon (Thomas Schubert) and his photographer friend Felix (Langston Uibel), who visit an idyllic cottage for the summer and vie for the affections of Nadja (Paula Beer), a free-spirited woman who has taken up residence there. As Felix and Nadja soak in the pleasures of their surroundings, Leon grows obsessively self-pitying and fixated on his stalled novel. As a forest fire engulfs their surroundings, he remains steadfastly focused on himself.
Aside from being a deliciously entertaining romance, Afire is a biting metaphor for how we have continually ignored the climate crisis and fixated on our own individual concerns. Leon is so caught up in his own perceived victimhood that he isn’t interested in the actual fire at his doorstep. His willful ignorance is maddening, and we despise his character, only realising after the fact, perhaps, that he is a stand-in for us all.
