When the highly anticipated Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga hits theaters this week, moviegoers will return to director George Miller's dystopian desert vision of a world undone by ecological catastrophe and climate change.
Miller first had Mad Max and other ragged desperados racing for the last drops of water and gasoline back in 1979. Since then, as New York Times chief film critic Manohla Dargis wrote last week in her (favorable) Furiosa review, "the distance between Miller's scorched earth and ours has narrowed."
Indeed, in 1979 the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas causing our world to warm, hovered just under 340 parts per million (ppm). Today, CO2 levels have rocketed to nearly 427 ppm, and average global temperatures have been rising in tandem.
Last year was the hottest on record and brought extreme storms, heat waves and wildfires that scientists had long warned would come with a changing climate. According to one recent study, the summer of 2023 was the Northern Hemisphere's hottest in 2,000 years.
But while we can see the growing evidence of a crisis around us with alarming frequency, we do not often see climate change depicted when we go to the movies. According to a recent survey of top films, Furiosa will be among the just under 10 percent of major movies released in the past decade that acknowledge climate change.
That's a problem, climate activist Anna Jane Joyner told Newsweek. Good Energy, the group she founded and leads, works as a "story consultancy" to give climate change a larger presence in Hollywood films.
"They are the most powerful storytelling engine in our world," Joyner said. "So, it's really important that climate shows up."
Good Energy partnered with the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment at Colby College to publish a review of the 250 most popular fictional films released between 2013 and 2022. The Buck Lab researchers found that only 9.6 percent of the movies meet the group's test for climate reality in film narratives.
The findings come at a pivotal time as the industry struggles to find its footing amid streaming technology and competition from other entertainment sources, possibly reducing the appetite for scripts that tackle tough social topics.
A leading studio that had championed climate change and other causes, Participant Media, recently announced its closure, prompting an open letter from Hollywood A-listers including George Clooney, Don Cheadle and Ava DuVernay urging studio executives not to give up on issue-oriented movies.
Joyner said the stakes go far beyond the world of films into the realm of climate action, which she said needs the public attention movies can provide.
"There's not been a social movement in history that won without engaging storytellers and artists," she said.
The Climate Reality Test
Joyner said climate change can show up in films in a wide variety of ways, and the Buck Lab and Good Energy developed a methodology to assess those called the climate reality test.
"It just tests the baseline," she said. "Does climate change exist in the world of this story, and does a character know it?"
Among the rather short list of movies that meet that test, many fall in the superhero and big-budget action genres. Climate change is often part of a dystopian future or a villain's plot the heroes must avert. Aquaman, Fantastic Four, Justice League and The Amazing Spiderman 2 all passed the test and made the Good Energy list.
In others, a film's plot might not hinge on climate change, but the issue is present in dialogue.
"This is also very psychologically important for normalizing conversations around climate change and validating an audience's own emotional experience," Joyner said. The 2019 drama Marriage Story falls in this category (and is among Joyner's personal favorites).
Then there is a category of films in which the writers and producers create what Joyner calls a "climate world."
"It's when climate is a context of the story that comes up over time," she said. "It's woven in throughout the story, it affects the characters' lives and it actually affects the storylines."
Joyner places the 2022 film Glass Onion in this category. Ed Norton's character promotes a clean-energy technology that drives the plot and (spoiler alert) turns out to be disastrously dangerous.
Despite the low percentage of films that passed the test, Joyner said she finds reasons for optimism in the survey results. An earlier study her group published ranking thousands of movie and television scripts found just under 3 percent acknowledged climate change.
"At least we're moving in the right direction," she said.
There was also a positive trend over the period the group measured in the recent survey. Twice as many films released in the second half of the decade passed the climate test compared to those from the first half of the decade.
And Joyner pointed out something from the box office results. According to the survey, films that met at least part of the climate test performed 10 percent better than those that did not.
She's not claiming that climate content is a guaranteed moneymaker, she said. Rather, she viewed the findings as evidence that movie producers shouldn't be afraid of alienating audiences when they address the reality of climate change.
"It's definitely not hurting the profitability of these films," she said.
A Deep Eco-Cinematic History
Activists like Joyner are following in a long history of environmental themes in film stretching back to the very origins of cinema, according to authors Joseph Heumann and Robin Murray.
Both are emeritus professors at Eastern Illinois University, he in communication studies and she in English, and together they've written eight books on how movies have depicted ecological issues.
The earliest example they cite comes from the Lumière brothers, French pioneers of early filmmaking. In a short film from 1896, the Lumières used footage shot in Baku, Azerbaijan, site of one of the first large oil discoveries.
"The way that people looked at what we would call an eco-disaster today was that it was this amazing production of oil," Heumann told Newsweek. He said the film shows a figure walking in front of giant wells spewing oil into the air.
"You can see how horrible and toxic the environment is, but that the figure doesn't seem to care," he said.
Heumann and Murray explore how various environmental themes show up in horror, action, westerns and even comedy over the years. They said they've found that environmental themes in films tend to cycle with the overall public profile of ecological issues.
The 1970s saw the rise of the environmental movement, the energy crisis and the first Earth Day, and there was a corresponding surge in movies with those themes.
"We have films from the '70s that were responding to this new vision for environmental change," Murray said.
One film from that period, the 1973 science-fiction movie Soylent Green, is one of the first major movies to mention "the greenhouse effect." Charlton Heston struggles through the heat in what must be one of the sweatiest movies ever made—each character is covered with a shiny layer—amid a landscape beset by overpopulation and, of course, hunger.
While climate might be missing from many big-budget fiction films today, Murray said, she sees a boom in small-budget, independent and documentary films tackling environmental themes.
"We're seeing, I think, more of those films because there's more awareness of climate change," she said.
The question, Heumann said, is whether those films motivate viewers to act.
"You can give the audience members knowledge, and some of that knowledge they'll take away, but it doesn't necessarily translate to activism yet," he said.
In a historic plot twist worthy of a Hollywood script, Baku, Azerbaijan—scene of the Lumière brothers' early film about oil—will host the annual United Nations climate talks, COP29, this November.
A Personal Climate Connection
One film on the Good Energy survey list that most explicitly deals with climate change hardly mentions it—at least not directly. Don't Look Up, from 2021, starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of scientists trying to warn an oblivious, pop culture-saturated society about an impending collision with a comet.
The comet becomes a metaphorical stand-in for climate change, allowing director Adam McKay a chance for some darkly comic commentary on the political and media obstacles to addressing the crisis.
Joyner said the film connected with her as someone who has been involved in climate communications for two decades.
"It was so cathartic to see that on screen because that was like the first ten years of my career," Joyner said, comparing the public response to climate warnings to the blasé response to the comet in the film. "It's like, 'There's a comet coming at us!' And it doesn't seem like anyone in my life or in our country or world cares. And am I going crazy?"
Joyner traces her climate activism to her early surroundings and upbringing. She grew up on the Gulf Coast, an environment that's highly vulnerable to climate impacts such as sea level rise and extreme weather, and she said that her father, a megachurch preacher and author on conservative political themes, is a climate change skeptic. (He's recently moderated his view, she said.)
Her relationship with her father and her efforts to sway his opinion were depicted in the Emmy Award-winning documentary Years of Living Dangerously.
"I've had my share of climate anxiety and grief and anger and other dark emotions," Joyner said of her work on the issue. She said she often finds herself turning to stories to help process those feelings.
"In the age of climate change, that's where we go to find meaning, and we always have," she said, explaining the direction of her activism with Good Energy. "That's why I thought, Focus on Hollywood."
Update 5/20/2024, 11:00 a.m. ET: This story was updated to clarify the role the Buck Lab played in the film research.
