A rodeo crowd waves cowboy hats as a man rides a bucking horse. Then comes a shower of leaves, a chorus of mobile phone rings and a wail of klaxons. Horses run wild and cars collide. One vehicle is whipped into the air by what a weatherman calls a once-in-a-generation tornado outbreak.
This is a scene from Twisters, starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones, in which rivals come together to try to predict and possibly tame ferocious storms in central Oklahoma. A sequel to the hit disaster movie Twister from 1996, it is a Hollywood summer blockbuster designed to entertain – but also a lost opportunity to raise awareness of the climate crisis.
“I just wanted to make sure that with the movie, we don’t ever feel like [it] is putting forward any message,” director Lee Isaac Chung, who grew up in Oklahoma’s tornado belt, told CNN. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”
That may not come as a surprise to scientists and climate activists. Despite global heating’s existential threat to humanity, and despite Hollywood’s left-leaning tendencies, the subject rarely makes it to the big screen.
A study published by the nonprofit consultancy Good Energy and Colby College’s Buck Lab for Climate and Environment analysed whether the climate crisis was present in 250 of the top-grossing fictional films between 2013 and 2022. In only 32 of the films (12.8%) was it clear that climate change exists, and in only 24 of them (9.6%) was it clear that a character knows it.
The most notable recent example of a film that did tackle the topic – albeit via allegory – was Don’t Look Up, a 2021 satire about two scientists who try in vain to warn the world about a planet-destroying comet.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep and Cate Blanchett, the film memorably depicted TV hosts consumed by trivia rather than the extinction event – a stark warning about humanity’s ongoing insouciance as the planet burns.
Its writer and director, Adam McKay, says via email: “I had become aware of the specific science and risk of rapid climate warming about five to six years ago and soon after began having trouble sleeping.
“I couldn’t believe the degree to which large news media and government were downplaying or barely mentioning something so massive and threatening. It felt, and still feels like, living in a farcical comedy with very real and very horrific outcomes.
“Which pretty much describes Don’t Look Up.”
During the second world war, numerous artists were recruited to create posters, comic books, radio shows and other propaganda. Is there a moral case for a similar all-hands mobilisation against fossil fuels?
Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, and her daughter, Chelsea, appear to think so. Too Small to Fail, the early childhood initiative of the Clinton Foundation, is encouraging writers and producers to infuse stories with a “compelling narrative” about young children and climate change.
McKay says: “There is no one way to make films, shows, music or write books about something as violently and globally transformative as climate breakdown. So I’m always wary of ‘this is how you do it’ approaches.
“We’re talking about 8 billion people reacting to oil companies destroying the entire livable climate. We need stories in hundreds of different languages, reflecting a thousand times more cultures experiencing varying degrees of awareness and emotional processing.”
He adds: “But if a film-maker is reluctant to let climate be in some way a part of their movie, I always tell them that it’s a guarantee within the next five years their film will play as irrelevant as movies do today about how noble the war against the ‘American Indians’ was.”
Yet references to the climate crisis continue to be scarce. Why is the topic so elusive? Part of the explanation may be a current backlash against perceived political messaging in films, exemplified by criticism of Disney for going “woke”. Climate stories in particular may also be difficult to pitch to producers.
Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank in Washington, says: “Climate change affects everything so it’s a piece of any story that we tell, but it also can be anxiety-provoking and depressing for people.
“I’m not surprised that Hollywood hasn’t included many climate stories. They want to sell films. People want to escape and be entertained in films, and climate change is a harder sell. I can tell you anecdotally I have met and spoken to screenwriters who want to increase the number of scripts that include climate change, and are working to help other writers to incorporate it.
“Coming up with a storyline that has climate at its centre is difficult to do, so they all expressed frustration and disappointment at the lack of interest in these storylines. But at least in my experience, there are a group of writers out there that want to do more. It’s just a matter of finding somebody who’s interested in producing the film.”
The climate crisis unfolds over a massive timespan and lacks a Darth Vader/Thanos/Voldemort-style villain. Hill draws a contrast with storytelling about another existential threat: nuclear war. “There’s a person behind it or a nation,” she says. “Somebody is going to push a button and that’s gonna cause it. What’s the storyline here – we’re all burning fossil fuels as I get in my car and drive someplace?
“It doesn’t fit the narrative that we’re used to as humans sitting around fires telling stories: here’s a god or a person involved. That isn’t the case with climate changes. It’s many, many people and it becomes uninteresting because it’s everyone.”
Twenty years after its release, Roland Emmerich’s summer blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, starring Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal, still stands alone as a classic disaster movie that explicitly attributes its litany of death and destruction to the greenhouse effect.
The film opens with politicians dismissing scientists’ concerns about the loss of a huge chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf. But soon enough the Gulf Stream’s shutdown triggers a series of freak weather events – tornadoes devastating Los Angeles, for example – climaxing in a new ice age.
The movie was high on special effects and low on scientific facts. William Hyde, a paleoclimatologist, was allegedly paid $100 by members of an internet chatroom to watch it. His verdict: “This movie is to climate science what Frankenstein is to heart surgery.”
Even so, studies found that The Day After Tomorrow raised public awareness of the climate crisis. David Lipsky, author of The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, says by phone from New York: “At the time, it was seen as ridiculous and the kind of mistake Hollywood makes that actually turns the audience off of this as a serious issue. But in the 20 years since, people have begun saying that isn’t such a silly thing.
“It has to go faster but in fact the Gulf Stream being shut down would have some of those results. In a way, that movie has aged like the issue in that it seemed absurd at first and now we’re like, you know what, ‘global weirding’ is more accurate than just saying ‘global warming’, which is fascinating.”
Asked whether film-makers have an ethical responsibility to tackle the subject, Lipsky identifies a parallel with slavery: “The model is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That issue had to be addressed and so Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote that novel. When Lincoln had an audience with her at the White House, he said, so you’re the woman who caused this civil war of ours. Sometimes the expression of something can be so astonishing and so direct that it makes people take action.
“Upton Sinclair changed the way we regulate meat, not just in America but all around the world, when he worked for a few months in Chicago and said: these are the terrible conditions. Throughout our history, there have been moments when someone gifted has come along and found a way to tell a story that absolutely changes our opinion on things, But it tends to be someone who’s really good.”
And not all examples are positive, warns Lipsky, who notes that a solution many climate scientists crave – nuclear power – stalled for decades because of public safety concerns: “You know what stopped it cold? The China Syndrome movie coming a few months after Three Mile Island [the partial meltdown of a reactor near Middletown, Pennsylvania in 1979].
“The movie itself stuck in people’s minds. That’s the danger of having talented film-makers take on an issue like that. They might get some of it wrong so there’s a cautionary tale there, too.”
Other experts take comfort in the view that climate storytelling is still in its infancy. There are countless different ways to get at the issue.
Joshua Glick, visiting associate professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, says: “There has always been an affinity between the blockbuster as mode or practice of film-making and natural disaster plots.
“These films are big-budget, grand in scale, have a star-studded cast and are often showcases for digital effects work. As the climate crisis has become more visible or the topic of debate and of greater interest, certainly to the younger generation, you will see it surface on screen in various ways in mainstream cinema.”
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist, professor at Texas Tech University and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, recalls: “I was beating the bushes to find non-documentary movies for my students to watch. What all of these stories had in common is that they presented the apocalyptic scenario: the world as we know it is over and people are struggling to survive.”
Hayhoe points to 2040, an Australian documentary that imagines what the planet could look like if humanity embraces the climate fixes it has already: “I’ve read about how it was so empowering for people to see what a better future could look like, that they wanted that better future when they saw what it would look like. It’s one thing for films to show us what we want to avoid but we at the same time have to show what we want to move towards.
“Individual episodes within ongoing series, movies, books, short videos – there’s just so much opportunity to tell compelling stories that people can see themselves in, that they can relate to and identify with, not just in terms of being put at risk from the harms of climate change but also that they can see themselves and what solutions look like.”