How Hollywood portrays climate change
Cli-fi - or climate fiction - is an ever-more popular genre for major movies. They typically depict a lone hero saving the world from apocaplyse. But comic and poetic takes on global warming are also making their mark.
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Climate change provides the sinister backdrop in this much-acclaimed 2012 film, which combines poetry and politics. The plot follows six-year-old Hushpuppy through her life after hurricane Katrina. The child's community faces melting ice caps that flood her home and unleash ancient aurochs.
Waterworld
Back in 1995, Kevin Costner played the hero of a distant, dystopian future, where polar ice caps have completely melted and flooded every continent. The surviving humans live in ramshackle floating communities and dream of a "dryland" somewhere in the ocean. Costner's character ultimately leads survivors to the top of Mount Everest, which is filled with vegetation and wildlife.
Geostorm
The controversial subject of geoengineering takes center-stage in the latest cli-fi movie, due for US release on October 20. Gerard Butler plays an astronaut who tries to save the world from a storm of epic proportions caused by malfunctioning climate-controlling satellites.
Downsizing
Not all cli-fi movies are about an apocalypse. This soon-to-be-released film comedy-drama takes a humorous look at how to tackle global warming. People are shrunk to tiny versions of themselves to use fewer resources. Starring Matt Damon and Christoph Waltz, it will hit cinemas in December 2017.
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power
Al Gore's Oscar-winning 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" was full of dire warnings of what climate change will bring. His 2017 sequel shows exactly what has been happening around the world since then: "Rain bombs" lashing cities around the world, flooding of biblical proportions in Miami and Manhattan, collapsing glaciers in Antarctica and raging wildfires in Europe and Canada.
The Day After Tomorrow
Roland Emmerich's 2004 disaster flick was one of the first and most successful movies about climate change. It depicts New York City as a frozen, dystopian landscape after disruption of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation leads to a new ice age. A box-office hit, researchers criticized its numerous scientific inaccuracies.
Before the Flood
This 2016 National Geographic documentary harnessed Leonardo DiCaprio's star power to inspire viewers to take action and change their habits. The actor-turned-climate-activist visits various regions of the world to explore the impacts of global warming and provides examples of what individuals can do to mitigate environmental damage.