Pirate's Cove

Rather than just making good movies, Hollywood has been going the SJW route for a while now, but, this really ramped up during the Bush years. And most of those movies tanked. What are they trying now?

"Downsizing" movie plot: Humans shrunk to 5" tall in an attempt to prevent AGW? https://t.co/5t4ha2Pnbe

— Tom Nelson (@TomANelson) October 19, 2017

From the idiot article, which makes normal weather into a supervillain or something

In 2004, when climate change was still called global warming, it was considered sensational enough to get top billing in The Day After Tomorrow, a city-smashing blockbuster by disaster master Roland Emmerich. But the incremental death march of the real thing was considered a little too slow for Independence Day’s king of kablooey. So impatient was he to bring forth a biblical flood and subsequent ice age that was epic enough to swallow the Statue of Liberty, Emmerich conspired to make his cataclysm happen in days, not decades, courtesy of a cosmically unlucky (and scientifically unlikely) flash freeze.

In 2017, the desire to accelerate climate change – even in the name of brash, mass-market pop art – is quaint yet horrifying. The nagging feeling that humankind may already have zoomed past some sort of ecological tipping point thanks to our voracious appetites for cheap energy and consumer goods seems increasingly undeniable. Previously, we looked to the multiplex to vicariously experience the catastrophic aftermath of freak super-storms and monster tsunamis; now we see these images appear with increasing and distressing regularity in the news.

Perhaps that is why climate change is a common theme across a broad range of movies this year, either as an obvious baddie or a subtextual spectre. The forthcoming eco-thriller Geostorm optimistically suggests that we could circumvent the cataclysmic heavy weather caused by climate change if only we tasked someone like scientist-astronaut Gerard Butler to invent a network of weather-controlling satellites. But when that system malfunctions, the planet reaps the whirlwind (not to mention mega-storms and tidal waves). Director Dean Devlin, who produced Independence Day with Emmerich, seems keen to outdo his old partner in terms of on-screen mass obliteration, with cities such as Dubai, Tokyo and Moscow in his apocalyptic sights. Whether global audiences will be excited by such destruction after recent natural disasters in Mexico, Sierra Leone, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, remains to be seen.

Many recent movies are mentioned, such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel (bombed, and a follow up to a movie that was dodgy scientifically), Interstellar and Logan (they try and link AGW to them), Mad Max: Fury Road (did well, because they didn’t make it about AGW. The original was more about war), Blade Runner 2049 (it bombed), Mother! (which utterly bombed, and drove Jennifer Lawrence to pronounce she’s taking a break), and, of course, Geostorm, which is expected to bomb.

In the forthcoming Downsizing, Oscar-winning writer-director Alexander Payne imagines a near future where eco-conscious Norwegians have developed a sci-fi shrink-ray that can zap people, such as stressed everyman Matt Damon, down to just five inches in height. Everything about this growing community of nu-Lilliputians is smaller – particularly their carbon footprint. In the film, the procedure is marketed as a quasi-altruistic lifestyle choice that doubles as a lottery win, suggesting participants will improve the planet’s sustainability as well as artificially extending their savings.

And Hollywood wonders why fewer people are going to the movies. First, the material is not that good. Second, people do not want to be preached to. They want to be entertained.