Movies set in non-dystopian climate futures?

March 3, 2021 8:10 AM

A friend is writing their thesis about climate change story-telling in movies. They're having trouble finding stories that paint a more hopeful picture of futures where we've actually managed to avert worst-case dystopian scenarios. What fiction (preferably science fiction) movies would you recommend?

Past threads have covered books, e.g. Contemporary-Visions-of-Utopia or utopia more generally, e.g. Accentuate-the-positive. Recent or even 20th c. movies welcome. Thanks!

posted by anthill to Media & Arts (14 answers total)

Without too many spoilers, Wim Wenders's Until the End of the World.
posted by johngoren at 8:17 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Kim Stanley Robinson?
posted by BrStekker at 8:31 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

[Or Star Trek IV]
posted by johngoren at 8:31 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

The term to look for is 'solarpunk'.
This article suggests Black Panther's Wakanda.
posted by signal at 8:40 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

The conceit of Moon is that the He-3 mined on the moon is such an incredible fuel source that it basically saved earth after the oil crisis. That's not what the movie is about, but that's the setting.
posted by phunniemee at 8:42 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Does it definitely have to be movies? I ask because the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn did an interesting trick with this issue [MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD] by positing a future in which climate change had been solved through massive technological innovation, but which was ruined anyway when that same technology was weaponized. I say trick because "solving climate change" was a necessary story element to raise the stakes for the future dystopia in the first place (we'd come so close to avoiding it! We'd solved the problem that was going to cause the dystopia, but then another one happened instead!).

Sorry if this was a total derail.
posted by saladin at 8:44 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

The Earth of Star Trek is very much a post-scarcity world, which might be the term to search for (Iain Banks' Culture novels are a classic of this genre). The Earth in those films is verdant and powered by entirely clean energy. The implication is very much that going out to the stars and seeing bigger problems there has made humans as a race band together (there is a central world government) and join like-minded aliens (hence the Federation).

Assuming it doesn't have to be a movie about beating climate change, but just non-dystopian futures, how about The Fifth Element?
posted by underclocked at 10:40 AM on March 3, 2021 [2 favorites]

Not a movie but in the Expanse the Earth has gone through some significant climate change. For the most part we only see NYC but it has massive sea walls, and there are some satellite-type shots of the planet showing the extent to which the contours of various land masses have changed. It isn't a dystopia because even though things aren't great for a lot of people on Earth it is still considered the best place to live in the solar system.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:48 AM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's a book and thus unhelpful but Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach might be some good background.
posted by goatdog at 12:07 PM on March 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Interstellar is largely about how humanity comes through a climate crisis on Earth and finds a way to survive. But the solution is to leave Earth, so it may not be what you're looking for.

Not a movie, but Jon Bois' 17776 and its sequel 20020 mention how countries other than the US manage to avoid the worst of the rising seas and manage to "rebuild Antarctica". There's also not really a sense that the climate has changed overall, other than the rising of the sea levels.
posted by Johnny Assay at 12:57 PM on March 3, 2021

I'm not clear if you're looking for movies that specifically call out "climate change was a thing, and we beat it!"or just movies set in a future where climate change doesn't seem to be an issue, having presumably been dealt with.

If it's the latter, then the 1999 film Bicentennial Man (starring the late Robin Williams) showed a future climate that looked positively bucolic.
posted by some little punk in a rocket at 4:21 PM on March 3, 2021

Response by poster: Thank you all for the answers, keep them coming! Preference is for movies which acknowledge climate change was a thing, but without the post-apocalyptic or fatalist easy out.
posted by anthill at 1:33 PM on March 4, 2021

I wasn't crazy about Her for a variety of reasons, but I did really like the way that film's futuristic world looked and felt.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 4:30 PM on March 5, 2021

The cyclical timelessness of cinematic post-doc małni—towards the ocean, towards the shore (trailer) might qualify, in some sense?
posted by progosk at 1:26 AM on March 6, 2021