Coming trend in movies: A new villainy, with the environment as victim

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: On Screens Soon, an Abused Earth Gets Its Revenge
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
Published: March 12, 2007


DreamWorks Pictures and Columbia Pictures
In Michael Bay’s summer movie, “Transformers,” robot warriors escape a devastated planet only to arrive on an equally dismal Earth.

....(M. Night Shyamalan’s) “The Happening” will not be the only big-budget studio film to test a new kind of villainy, in which the real victim is the environment, and, whatever the plot variations, the enemy is all of us. Beginning this summer and for months after, movies as diverse as the “The Simpsons Movie,” “Transformers,” a remake of “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” and James Cameron’s “Avatar” will take on environmental themes.

Dumping Hollywood villains of the past — drug lords, aliens, North Korean dictators, even the news media — for an environmental bête noire carries risks for studios that don’t mind frightening viewers, as long as it’s all in fun. But it also hints at the possibility of more sophisticated entertainment, and perhaps even the kind of impact that “The China Syndrome,” with Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, exerted on the nuclear power industry when it came out in 1979.

That an environmental consciousness should be slipping into the film industry’s prospective blockbusters is not surprising in an era when Al Gore and friends have picked up an Oscar (and hefty box-office returns) for their global-warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and when the debate it fed has largely slipped its partisan moorings.

“With this thinking all around, it’s obviously leaking into the popcorn movies,” Roberto Orci, the co-writer with Alex Kurtzman of the action-oriented “Transformers,” said of the environmental ethos.

In “Transformers,” which DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures are scheduled to release on July 4, robot warriors escape a planet laid waste by civil war, only to arrive on Earth as it faces similar devastation. Mr. Orci added that he had seen a number of development projects recently in which the monster was created by environmental change....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/movies/12vill.html?ex=1331352000&en=ca92dc7d4e5ac138&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

[Miss Chybil]

1. Just a few years behind Tolkien, but great news none the less! nt

[Erika]

2. Yes. The earth needs a revenge against it's abusers

Loved the cartoon on W's idea of a heathy forest. One tree remaining in 20,000 acres. No fires, no bugs and the corporatists stripped all other trees siting healthy forests.

[Kutjara]

3. The visionary actor, director, writer and musician Steven Segal was there first.

Future film scholars will consider "On Deadly Ground" to be a seminal work in the history of environmentally-conscious filmmaking. Segal has proven himself to be ahead of his time in getting to grips with terrorism (punch the perp rapidly in the face then break his neck); social injustice (punch the bigot rapidly in the face then break his neck); domestic abuse (punch the abuser rapidly in the face then break his neck); and the environment (punch the environment rapidly in the face then...no wait, that's not right.)

In a hundred years, the world will be covered with statues of Steven Segal, fitting tribute to the man who first identified and battled global warming by punching it rapidly in the face.

[Bucky]

4. Riiiight. Like the Transformers are all supposed to run on solar energy. Sheeesh

Pollution is the new drug lords. This has nothing to do with preaching Hollywood and everything to do with unimaginative Hollywood.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

5. I recommend Ferngully

best animated environmental film, ever. :)