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November 06, 2009
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What are the five best environmental movies of all time?
— The Editors
Santa Fe, New Mexico
 The initial--and wrong--impulse would be to pick documentaries. Yes, I know, you like them. But where are the body counts? Pyrotechnics? Besides, they don't have much sway with the average public, unless Michael Moore's name is attached. Beg to differ? Well, consider that An American Tail: Fievel Goes West grossed more than twice as much at the box office than An Inconvenient Truth.
So, let's focus solely on good, old-fashioned mainstream flicks--with big-name actors and bloated marketing budgets--that manage to sneak an environmental message into their overblown plotlines. Here's my completely scientific list of the five best environmental movies of all time, based upon a complex and infallible computer-based analysis that I don't have the time nor willingness to explain:
5. Waterworld
Big-name stars: Kevin Costner, Dennis Hopper
Global warming strikes with a vengeance, the polar ice caps melt, sea levels rise, and what are we left with? A world of water, featuring Kevin Costner in the most expensive vanity project since the Taj Mahal was built. No, this isn't exactly the future scenario that Al Gore draws out. Instead, it's much cooler (in an overheated-planet kind of way). Most of Earth's surviving humans have spent generations adrift on makeshift boats, trading commodities like dirt and fresh water and always on the lookout for evil pirates. Some have even evolved (take that, creationists!) to have gills and webbed feet. The movie is so dripping with over-the-top symbolism that Dennis Hopper's dastardly character actually captains the salvaged Exxon Valdez. And throughout, we're nagged by this question: If Kevin Costner has enough cloth to make a giant sail for his boat, how come he can't stitch together a decent shirt? The lesson: Without global warming, this movie could never have been made--so maybe there are benefits to driving a Hummer, after all.
4. Deliverance
Big-name stars: John Voight, Burt Reynolds
Four city slickers from Atlanta decide to spend a few days canoeing down a stretch of whitewater in the Appalachian wilderness that's set to disappear because of the completion of a new dam. Nothing goes according to plan, and they end up watching one of their buddies die, while another (Reynolds) suffers an extremely grisly compound leg fracture, and a third (Ned Beatty) is forced to "squeal like a pig" by two toothless, horny hillbillies. This is the ultimate cautionary "Man versus Nature" movie, and you can guess who wins the battle. The lesson: If Hollywood ever remakes this movie, and you're offered the Ned Beatty role, turn it down.
3. Chinatown
Big-name stars: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway
This is considered to be one of the greatest movies of all time. Nicholson plays a gumshoe in the late 1930s who's hired to tail an engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water--an agency rife with corruption. In an artistic way, it sheds light on how Central California's Owens Valley was drained of water by William Mulholland to quaff parched Los Angeles in the early 20th century. It's also an eye-opening reminder of how tenuous the West's water situation is. The lesson: Some people will kill over water, and you bleed a lot when your nose is slit by a knife.
2. The China Syndrome
Big-name stars: Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas, Jack Lemmon
This shrill and fantastical nuclear disaster flick from 1979 is based on the faulty premise that a complete meltdown at an American nuclear power plant would bore a radioactive hole through the Earth's core, reaching all the way to China. It was given a complete gift from the marketing gods when the Three Mile Island accident occurred 12 days after its release. This one-two punch so successfully scared the crap out of the American public that no new reactors have been built in the country since. The lesson: No two are sexier at telling the world that nuclear power plants and their owners are E-V-I-L than Fonda and Douglas.
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1. Fire Down Below
Big-name star: Steven Seagal
Seagal is a bad-ass Environmental Protection Agency agent (aren't they all?) who arrives in a rural Kentucky town to investigate reports that an evil coal company (aren't they all?) is dumping toxic waste down abandoned mine shafts and slowly poisoning the locals. Kris Kristofferson gives his best performance since Big Top Pee-Wee as the token evil dude who gets his butt justifiably kicked by Seagal's near-lethal black-belt aikido moves. (Seagal isn't some one-environmental-movie wonder, either. He also stars in On Deadly Ground as an ex-CIA agent who opens a can of you-know-what on a bunch of oil executives in Alaska.) The lesson: If the federal government really wants to end pollution, it should give every EPA agent a license to kill.
Eco Adventurer
Greg Melville is the author of Greasy Rider, a new book in which he drives across the country in a fry-oil-powered car investigating the future of green technology. A journalist who has written for Outside, The New York Times, and Popular Mechanics, Melville blogs about all things eco at greasyriderbook.blogspot.com. He lives with his wife, kids, and dog in Asheville North Carolina.
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