Earth Day movie playlist: 15 cautionary tales of climate disaster

This atmospheric thriller set at a drilling site in the Arctic National Wildlife refuge is a quintessential example of the “eco-horror” genre, in which atrocities against nature are avenged via terrifying attacks on humans by natural or supernatural forces. In , director Larry Fessenden () uses the backdrop of the snowy tundra nearly as effectively as John Carpenter did in , while establishing a quieter, more dreamlike mood. It’s not clear exactly what the crew of environmental scientists and oil workers, led by Ron Perlman as the hard-headed chief of the operation, have awakened beneath the surface of the thinning arctic ice (thanks to warmer-than-normal temperatures), but as they slowly lose their minds, and their lives, it’s clear that something is out there and it is very angry with us.

Before starring together as the Emperor and Empress of Russia in The Great, Nicolas Hoult and Elle Fanning appeared opposite each other in , a post-apocalyptic genre mashup that’s part Western, part sci-fi, part psychological thriller. Writer-director Jake Paltrow envisions a dystopian future that’s bright and barren, after severe drought has led to localized water wars and disputes over what little farmland remains. Although the story is as shallow as the roots of a thirsty sprout, there are still a lot of creative ideas here, and some compelling performances from Hoult and Fanning, as well as co-stars Michael Shannon and Kodi Smit-McPhee. What it lacks in depth, the film more than makes up for in prescience. A parched world in which precious resources are controlled by a corrupt, government-backed syndicate is all too plausible.

In an alternate timeline 1,000 years in the future, the world has become so polluted that humans can no longer reproduce. The solution? Time traveling back to the past and kidnapping people from crashing airplanes just as they’re about to die. A little bit cheesy, and very much of its time, Millennium stars singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson as an aeronautical inspector and former Charlie’s Angel Cheryl Ladd as an operative sent from the future to collect the healthy specimens. The air in the future has gotten so bad that whenever Ladd’s character visits the past she has to constantly smoke cigarettes to breathe normally. The good news is that our air quality is actually better now than in 1989, when the film came out, thanks to amendments to the Clean Air Act passed with bipartisan support in 1990. The fight to keep these regulations from being rolled back is ongoing, but it’s one area where we’ve made some progress.

Super storms, and the people who chase them, have been a rich source of material for movies since first blew through cinemas in 1996. But when came along in 2014 (not to be confused with the about the origins of the QAnon movement) it made the tornadoes in that film look like mere dust devils. It takes place in the small Oklahoma town of Silverton, as it’s hit by a series of increasingly severe weather events over the course of 24 hours. None of the characters in the film, including a team of storm chasers and scientists, ever mention the words “climate change” or “global warming,” but make no mistake—the found-footage scenes of destruction (rendered through stunning VFX) in the film are becoming more common every year in the real world.

This may look like a cute, animated fairytale for kids—and yes, it is that—but underneath that candy-colored coating is a full-throated criticism of deforestation and pollution, with songs. Featuring the voice talents of Samantha Mathis, Tim Curry, Christian Slater, and the late, great Robin Williams, is the story of a fairy and a human (accidentally shrunk down to fairy size) who have to save her rainforest home from a dark, malevolent spirit called Hexxus after it’s unleashed by a human logging operation. If you’ve got little ones, you might want to celebrate Earth Day by watching this together, as it’s a great introduction to the concepts of conservation and living in harmony with nature.

We all know the famous quote Charlton Heston’s character shouts at the end of this movie: “Soylent Green is people!” But how did things get so bad in the future world of (actually set in the year 2022, so we’re already overdue) that we had to resort to secretly turning dead people into food? A dystopic cocktail of pollution and overpopulation is to blame, apparently. The planet is polluted enough that nutritious food and clean water are scarce, yet not so much that there are fewer people to consume them. With the shady Soylent Corporation at the center of the murder mystery that drives the film’s plot, it turns out stone-cold capitalism is the main culprit behind it all. It’s so weird that the same economic system keeps coming up when we trace environmental crises back to their roots. What a coincidence.

In the subset of disaster movies referred to as “disaster porn,” is hard to beat. We don’t know what it is that makes us want to watch major cities and famous landmarks get absolutely destroyed, but Roland Emmerich (, , ) knows how to tap into that. In this film, on the cusp of a new ice age brought on by—you guessed it—climate change, environmental scientist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) learns that his Cassandra-like predictions of the end of the world are about to come true. But let’s be real, we don’t watch movies like this for character development or a cohesive story. We just want scenes like a tornado ripping apart the Capitol Records building and the Statue of Liberty frozen solid. Despite the sketchy science, it’s bizarrely compelling.

The action scenes might be the best part of , so if all you know about this Kevin Costner-starring action film from 1995 is the stunt show still running at Universal Studios theme parks, we get it. Set 500 years in the future, after the polar ice cap has melted and covered the world in water, a wandering trader known only as “The Mariner” (Costner) comes across a girl (Tina Majorino) with a coded map tattooed on her back that may lead to a mythical place called “dry land.” He ends up protecting her from a gang of roving pirates led by a wildly over-the-top Dennis Hopper, who ride around on jet skis, for some reason. Oh, and their flagship is the actual , in case the pro-environmental message wasn’t already clear enough. Yeah, this movie is as bonkers as it sounds.

Pixar went to the trouble of animating a gorgeous wasteland in , which illustrates (literally and figuratively) the consequences of contaminating the Earth with so much waste that humans can’t live there anymore. Wall-E is left behind, picking up our junk, until an Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (EVE) arrives to collect a plant sample and changes everything. There’s a whole second-act plot about a massive starliner cruising around space with the lazy, blubbery remains of the human population, but once again, the secret villain at the core of it all is capitalism.

Bong Joon-ho’s is a monster movie with a message. Inspired by the true story of a mortician in Seoul who was ordered by the U.S. military to dump large quantities of formaldehyde down a drain that led directly to a river, it centers on a family terrorized by a mutated creature that emerges from the river as a result. Not only are their calls for help to the government ignored, but they become wanted criminals for escaping quarantine in an attempt to rescue a child. There’s a lot to unpack here, but the environmental commentary is fairly straightforward.

It’s never explicitly stated in that “the blight” that’s infected plant life across the globe and caused most crops to die out before the film begins is a result of climate change, but some scientists who have studied the film have suggested there may be a link. at the University of Illinois, “Perhaps in Interstellar many of the species on the planet have been wiped out not from the blight, but from the issues we face now—climate change, habitat loss, poor land management, and so on. The environment we are presented in the movie is one low in species diversity, which lacks the resilience to withstand something as simple as a plant disease.” Whether or not the disaster is man-made, the film also highlights the unfortunate human tendency towards shortsightedness. Rather than taking steps to save our planet, we’d rather just find a new one. The problem with that is, as Interstellar shows, is it’s not so easy to do.

Although the disaster that created the post-apocalyptic world of (sometimes known as Mad Max 2) was nuclear rather than climate-related, the plot revolves around the shortage of gasoline, and that crisis is at least climate adjacent. The barbaric, fuel-obsessed society that arises in its wake is a dramatic, exaggerated depiction of what might happen if we should ever run out of oil. George Miller’s futuristic dieselpunk sequel to , starring Mel Gibson in one of his most memorable roles, influenced a generation of films, and filmmakers, that came after it. And without it we wouldn’t have gotten the spectacular 2015 follow-up, .

In (as well as the subsequent TV series based on the film), the end of the world isn’t caused by global warming, but by a failed attempt to correct it, which inadvertently brings on a new ice age. What’s left of humanity lives aboard a train built by a brilliant but megalomaniacal engineer (Ed Harris) that’s designed to circumnavigate the globe until the world thaws. Filmmaker Bong Joon-ho (the only director with two films on this list) also weaves in one of his favorite recurring themes of class inequality by dividing the train into highly stratified sections. The plot follows a man named Curtis (Chris Evans) who leads a group of rebels from the tail section, where the poorest and most desperate folks live, up to the engine room, where he uncovers the shocking secrets of the train. A was produced for TNT, though the network shelved and it’s still unknown whether it will find another home.

doesn’t hit you over the head with the harsh reality of climate change, it just drops you into The Bathtub, a flooded section of the Louisiana bayou, with a little force of nature named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) and her father, Wink (Dwight Henry). In the midst of this intimate portrait of a troubled family, we see images of glaciers calving, releasing prehistoric beasts called aurochs from the ice where they’ve been trapped for eons. Are these events actually happening, or is it all a product of Hushpuppy’s rich imagination? The film never commits either way, but it doesn’t need to. The true focus here is the fragile balance of life in a community that could be wiped out after one strong rainstorm, and the stubborn residents who are determined to make the most of every day.

Adam McKay’s 2021 satire gets an honorary spot on this list even though it’s technically not about climate change, but a comet headed for Earth that threatens to end civilization as we know it. It’s a pretty obvious allegory, though. The film’s commentary on the systemic obstacles standing in the way of progress, even as the reality of a mass extinction event is staring us right in the face, applies either way. It’s so much easier to deny that the end of the world is imminent than to accept that there’s something you can do about it. But if the likes of J-Law, Leo, Meryl, Cate, and Timothée can’t convince you, well, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?”