The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Global Warming comes from environmental science and is the idea that human activity (commonly in the form of burning carbon-based fuel products) has caused an overall rise in global temperatures. Scientists are almost completely unanimous in support of evidence for such and have issued strident warnings that consumption should be decreased. However, this has become a hotly contested theory in some areas often for very political reasons.
Science-fiction has created a number of works derived from this (what has become called Cli-Fi or Climate Fiction). The genre has depicted various new onset Ice Ages and environmentally devastated futures caused by rise in temperatures and/or sea levels to the point of in some cases of Earth becoming uninhabitable.
Using the framework of an SF film, told from the perspective of a devastated future, this is a documentary about Global Warming, although one that falls short of making a convincing argument
The sequel to the DCEU’s Aquaman reaches for epic effects spectacle, although the character of Aquaman undergoes a substantial shift and is now given more of a comedy playing
Extraordinary Sundance breakout hit that sits between a portrayal of a unique backwoods culture and a Magical Realist child’s eye viewpoint. A quite amazing film that announces one of the freshest directorial voices to emerge in ages
Birdemic was a cult bad movie – incredibly, despite the better budget that must have come his way, James Nguyen has gone and made the same thing filled with laughably flat dialogue and the worst effects ever seen on screen
At one point, Birdemic had a bad movie cult that rivalled The Room. Whether we asked for it or not, this is a third film in the series. James Nguyen seems to think everybody has come for a lecture about Global Warming.
The new contender for the Worst Film Ever Made, this fully lives up to its reputation, full of astounding technical ineptitudes, bad acting and hilarious one-liners. A blatant ripoff of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds
A pilot for a tv series that never went ahead set in a future where Global Warming has turned the Arctic into a thawed-out tundra where various countries seek to claim the new territory
An appealing Danish-made film in which a pilot travels back in time from the future to save the world from environmental disaster but finds she is now stuck in her twelve year-old body
Sequel to the tv mini-series Category 6: Day of Destruction ups the scale of the super-storm but is also better constructed as a disaster movie
This creates a fascinatingly different future – a world of grim survivalism amid a new Ice Age in the aftermath of Global Warming. The look of the film is fantastic, only to fritter it on an action focus and Mad Max cliches
In another of his big budget disaster spectacles, Roland Emmerich embraces environmental concerns about Global Warming. Here he (unscientifically) imagines the abrupt onset of a new Ice Age worldwide
Jodie Comer is a new mother who travels through an England that has been devastated by catastrophic flooding. Not dissimilar to The Road but less bleak
Abel Ferrara makes an End of the World film that hardly ever leaves the characters’ apartment and in which almost nothing happens. Considering the angry, bleak work of his heyday, you cannot wonder if the 60 year-old Ferrara has lost his mojo
Directorial debut of Roland Emmerich’s regular screenwriter Dean Devlin who has clearly been given orders to make another Emmerich film. Thus we get all the same effects-driven mass destruction spectacle, absurd science and pro-environmental messages
Baffling mix of teen drama and eco-SF film set in an ozone depleted future with Tcheky Karyo engaged in a series of human-plant mutations that transform him into a swarm of insects
A Roland Emmerich produced film that takes place in a future that has been catastrophically affected by a ten-degree rise in temperatures worldwide
Probably THE worst sequel ever made. The script’s treatment of continuity to the first film is utterly incoherent, while director Russell Mulcahy and most of the cast go at it with unrestrained OTT excess
Despite the title, this is not set on Jupiter’s moon but is strictly earthbound. It is one of the new genre of Cli-Fii (or Climate Fiction) works set in an interesting environmentally devastated future
The seventh of the Jurassic Park/World films, this receives a creative shot in the arm from Gareth Edwards, director of Monsters and The Creator
Film set in a Waterworld styled drowned future aboard a mid-ocean platform between two warring sides. A film that almost entirely exists in terms of finely tuned psychological tensions
A conceptually peculiar mix of Indiana Jones and Waterworld about tomb raiding adventures in a drowned future and the quest for Moses’s staff to turn back the rising waters
The novelty of the world’s first Vietnamese science-fiction film set in a future where many areas are underwater as a result of climate change. Much of this is a very dull film observing the day to day life of people affected but the SF elements intrude in occasionally interesting ways
Disaster movie from The Asylum set around global warming. Notable for two things – the wackiness of the scientist’s scheme to save the planet by creating black holes, and the cheapness of the production, which does almost everything it can to avoid effects shots
A low-budget post-apocalyptic action film featuring the almost completely forgotten martial arts and (non)-actor Ron Marchini who must venture out into the ruined city to rescue three girls
Another gonzo killer shark from from The Asylum who made the Sharknado films. Played somewhat more seriously than other entries, this has been conceived as Waterworld with killer sharks
Lisa Joy, co-creator of tv’s Westworld, directs a work of future noir in an ingenious plot involving a memory recording device and Hugh Jackman obsessed with a missing woman
This looked promising but is no more than an unoriginal rehash of the cliches of the Mad Max film – at heart a Western with only token effort made to rewrite the elements in SF terms – and no greater ambition beyond being cable filler
South Korean tv mini-series about the investigation of a moonbase with illicit experiments and something possibly alien unleashed
One of the most original science-fiction films of recent years. Set aboard a train where the last survivors of humanity circle a frozen globe, this is less an action film than something like Runaway Train turned into a unique conceptual breakthrough story, all rent through with a fierce parable about social revolution
A mishmash of Alien copy and supernatural serial killer film set in a drowned future London with a script that makes no real sense. The film’s buddy cop relationship starring Rutger Hauer does have its amusements.
This offers one of the more original twists on the Saw set-up – Val Kilmer plays a professor who imprisons a group of people in a steam room slowly turning the temperature up as a protest against global warming.
Okay borrowing from the set-up of The Thing about an outbreak of flesh-eating prehistoric insects at an Arctic research station
For an original that was only a modest box-office hit, it is surprising how long the Tremors series has kept going – five sequels, plus a tv series. This is the sixth film in the series and despite a limited and repetitive premise, characters running about hunting underground-burrowing monsters, it pulls off another enjoyable entry and fails to set a foot wrong
The most expensive film ever made at the time, a Kevin Costner epic in which he is a lone mariner in a drowned world where survivors cling to shantytowns floating on the surface. Essentially a Mad Max film located on water.