A couple of weeks ago, long after seemingly everyone else in the world, I saw Bong Joon-Ho’s film Parasite. I went in after hearing it was a thriller but was shocked by its underlying discussion on climate change. On the surface, the film follows the impoverished Kim family as they deceive the rich Park family into giving them generously paid jobs. However, in one seamless sequence, Bong shines a light on the issue of climate change in class-based tensions.
When a torrential downpour falls over the Kim and Park families, Bong juxtaposes how the two families are impacted by it. For the Park’s, the rain prompts a relaxing night sitting by the window, but for the Kim’s, their entire house is flooded. The next day we see the aftermath of this downpour as the Park’s go about their day getting dressed in designer clothes in their well-lit closets. The Kim family, on the other hand, is left rummaging through a pile of clothes in a messy gym where people from their flooded neighbourhood had stayed the night. Parasite discusses the ways climate change unequally impacts social classes. It exposes how upper-class families that live in excess, have the means to protect themselves from environmental danger, while lower-class families – who least impact the environment, bare the brunt of it’s current issues.
After mulling over this idea that Bong burrowed into Parasite, I wanted to see how other films of recent memory had been impacted by climate change. The genre where I saw the greatest shift was Sci-Fi films. Specifically, Sci-Fi films surrounding the idea of people exploring space. Before the 2000s, movies set in space were often stories of exploration. Some of the most famous of these spanning from the 1960s to the 1980s are; Alien, The Thing, and 2001 a Space Odyssey. Either stories of our interactions with extraterrestrial life or deep space travel, all of these films depict characters entering space out of curiosity – not necessity.
However, moving into the twentieth-first century there has been a shift from stories of curiosity to stories of survival. The Martian, Arrival and Interstellar to name a few. Instead of fun far fetched adventure films set in space, studios are beginning to output realistic reflections of what could be. Both the Martian and Interstellar discussing how we could successfully grow crops on another planet. Matt Damon has no time to lie around a beautifully decorated space ship in The Martian like the famous main character David does in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not only has climate change pointed societies’ eyes towards space as our home, but it has also impacted the way we depict space in our films – as a place, we must endeavour for survival.
The most obvious subgenre where I was able to see a shift towards climate-based topics was disaster movies. This article would go on for a while if I named them all, but some of the most famous are; 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and the recent 2017 film; Geostorm. All of which were blockbusters, and reveal how writers capitalize on societal fears.
Due to the fact that Sci-Fi and disaster genres place eco-catastrophe at the forefront of their stories, their environmentalist undertones can be blatant. However, there are many films like 2019’s Parasite where you can find eco-catastrophe themes hidden inside. Even in movies like Avengers: Endgame. Not only does the villain in Endgame illustrate the destruction caused by the human race, but even the protagonists discuss how his actions to eliminate half of the population allowed the environment to once again flourish. It seems that films that simply include our current society, have no choice but to involve climate change issues.
There is nothing like the power of story. Which is why films that incorporate environmental issues are needed now more than ever. Keep an eye out on your next trip to the theatre, you may be able to spot these climate change stories yourself!