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Tired of abuse by mankind, the earth is angry. Worse, the planet is out to eventhe score!
Audiences can expect a story along those lines when M.Night Shyamalan'sfilm The Happening reaches screens this year. The project, to which 20th Century Fox signed last year, imagines a planet that is starting to act like the vigilante Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver．
The Happening is not the only big-budget studio film to test a new kindof villainy, in which the real victim is the environment, and, whatever the plotvariations, the enemy is all of us. Beginning last summer, movies as diverse asthe The Simpsons Movie, a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon, and JamesCameron's Avatar have taken on environmental themes.
Dumping Hollywood villains of the past-druglords, aliens, dictators, even the news media-for anenvironmental bete noire carries risks for studios thatdon't mind frightening viewers, as long as it's all in fun．
That an environmental consciousness should beslipping into the film industry's prospective blockbustersis not surprising in an era when A1 Gore and friends havepicked up an Oscar (and hefty box-office returns) for theirglobal-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth，and when the debate it fed has largely slipped its partisanmoorings.
"With this thinking all around, it's obviously leakinginto the popcorn movies," Roberto Orci, the co-writer ofTransformers, said of the environmental ethos.
In Transformers, which DreamWorks andParamount Pictures released on July 4, 2007, robotwarriors escape a planet laid waste by civil war, onlyto arrive on Earth to find a world-controlling energycube. M.Orci added that he had seen a number ofdevelopment projects recently in which the monsterwas created by environmental change.
The source of that change hews closely toHollywood convention: the exploiter is often a bigcorporation wreaking havoc by its greed. In CreatureFrom the Black Lagoon, the remake that may bereleased by Universal Pictures this year, the murderousfish-man of the Amazon is spawned by the sins of apharmaceutical giant. "It's about the rain forest beingexploited for profit," explained Gary Ross, a writerand producer of the film.
In one form or another, the producer asenvironmental predator has worked in moviesincluding Silkood, the 1983 Meryl Streep dramaabout damage from plutonium processing; ErinBrockovich, the 2000 Julia Roberts movie aboutpower-plant pollution: and Fire Down Below,the 1997thriller in which Steven Seagal turns enviromnentalactivist by tearing into toxic-waste dumping?
More recently, The Children of Men, about infertility ofthe whole mankind, and 28 Weeks Later which features anunstoppable virus, have chosen to dwell in a morose futurereminiscent of Waterworld or the Mad Max series．
Yet some pictures in the next wave are driven by evilof a subtler kind. Among the more dating is Avatar, another Fox project that promises to become Mr. Cameron's firststudio feature since Titanic was released more than a decadeago. This science-fiction thriller posits a time when humanshave exhausted their resources and resort to raiding otherplanets to survive. The inhabitants of one such world fightback, led by a human who has seen the light and choosesto help the oppressed. Scheduled for release in the summerof 2009, Avatar is expected to cost about $200 million toproduce.
While acknowledging the delicacy of makingall of us somehow responsible for villainy--willviewers squirm at the notion of humanity as amonster? Jon Landau, who is producing the filmwith Cameron, described the twist as a natural one."Good science fiction plays as a metaphor for ourcurrent world," he said.
At the same time, Landau stressed thatCameron's lifelong approach has been to treat sociallessons as secondary to entertainment. "Peoplewho see the theme will get an important message"as something of a bonus, he said. (A similar ploysucceeded in The Day After Tomorrow, RolandEmmerich's 2004 thriller that initially generatedcontroversy with its climate-change theme, but didwell for Fox.)
Environmental themes are also becoming afactor in international cinema. For instance, in theanimated Tales" from Earthsea, by the Japanesedirector Goro Miyazaki, the characters struggle tofigure out a world whose balance has been destroyed.That movie was a big hit in Japan.
Given the relatively modest audience for recentserious films like Syriana, United 93 and BloodDiamond, producers are understandably wary of anysense that their popular entertainments are thinkingtoo much. Shyamalan's new project was on themarket for weeks before Fox agreed to take it on,and that occurred only after Shyamalan revised hisscript, bringing it more into line with his trademarkthrillers, The Sixth Sense and Signs. He also changeda working title, The Green Effect, that might haveseemed to put the film on a soapbox.
If Cameron and Shyamalan succeed, they mayhelp extinguish a growing fear among Hollywood'sfilm writers that the best villains are all used up.
"Good villains are very complex, butmovies are afraid" of them, said Lucy Stille,who has long represented writers and otherfilmmakers for the Paradigm agency. Stillesaid that she would welcome any changefrom the tradition of pushing off wrongdoingonto some rogue individual from any group,whether big business, the police or a terroristgroup.
Stille may get her wish since the goodguy and the bad guy are about to beginmeeting in the mirror, with planet Earth atstake.
Even in The Simpsons Movie, HomerSimpson, Hollywood's favorite doofusEveryman, threatened Springfield byunleashing environmental catastrophe?As the film's trailer warns: "The fate of theworld hangs in the balance.
Audiences can expect a story along those lines when M.Night Shyamalan'sfilm The Happening reaches screens this year. The project, to which 20th Century Fox signed last year, imagines a planet that is starting to act like the vigilante Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver．
The Happening is not the only big-budget studio film to test a new kindof villainy, in which the real victim is the environment, and, whatever the plotvariations, the enemy is all of us. Beginning last summer, movies as diverse asthe The Simpsons Movie, a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon, and JamesCameron's Avatar have taken on environmental themes.
Dumping Hollywood villains of the past-druglords, aliens, dictators, even the news media-for anenvironmental bete noire carries risks for studios thatdon't mind frightening viewers, as long as it's all in fun．
That an environmental consciousness should beslipping into the film industry's prospective blockbustersis not surprising in an era when A1 Gore and friends havepicked up an Oscar (and hefty box-office returns) for theirglobal-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth，and when the debate it fed has largely slipped its partisanmoorings.
"With this thinking all around, it's obviously leakinginto the popcorn movies," Roberto Orci, the co-writer ofTransformers, said of the environmental ethos.
In Transformers, which DreamWorks andParamount Pictures released on July 4, 2007, robotwarriors escape a planet laid waste by civil war, onlyto arrive on Earth to find a world-controlling energycube. M.Orci added that he had seen a number ofdevelopment projects recently in which the monsterwas created by environmental change.
The source of that change hews closely toHollywood convention: the exploiter is often a bigcorporation wreaking havoc by its greed. In CreatureFrom the Black Lagoon, the remake that may bereleased by Universal Pictures this year, the murderousfish-man of the Amazon is spawned by the sins of apharmaceutical giant. "It's about the rain forest beingexploited for profit," explained Gary Ross, a writerand producer of the film.
In one form or another, the producer asenvironmental predator has worked in moviesincluding Silkood, the 1983 Meryl Streep dramaabout damage from plutonium processing; ErinBrockovich, the 2000 Julia Roberts movie aboutpower-plant pollution: and Fire Down Below,the 1997thriller in which Steven Seagal turns enviromnentalactivist by tearing into toxic-waste dumping?
More recently, The Children of Men, about infertility ofthe whole mankind, and 28 Weeks Later which features anunstoppable virus, have chosen to dwell in a morose futurereminiscent of Waterworld or the Mad Max series．
Yet some pictures in the next wave are driven by evilof a subtler kind. Among the more dating is Avatar, another Fox project that promises to become Mr. Cameron's firststudio feature since Titanic was released more than a decadeago. This science-fiction thriller posits a time when humanshave exhausted their resources and resort to raiding otherplanets to survive. The inhabitants of one such world fightback, led by a human who has seen the light and choosesto help the oppressed. Scheduled for release in the summerof 2009, Avatar is expected to cost about $200 million toproduce.
While acknowledging the delicacy of makingall of us somehow responsible for villainy--willviewers squirm at the notion of humanity as amonster? Jon Landau, who is producing the filmwith Cameron, described the twist as a natural one."Good science fiction plays as a metaphor for ourcurrent world," he said.
At the same time, Landau stressed thatCameron's lifelong approach has been to treat sociallessons as secondary to entertainment. "Peoplewho see the theme will get an important message"as something of a bonus, he said. (A similar ploysucceeded in The Day After Tomorrow, RolandEmmerich's 2004 thriller that initially generatedcontroversy with its climate-change theme, but didwell for Fox.)
Environmental themes are also becoming afactor in international cinema. For instance, in theanimated Tales" from Earthsea, by the Japanesedirector Goro Miyazaki, the characters struggle tofigure out a world whose balance has been destroyed.That movie was a big hit in Japan.
Given the relatively modest audience for recentserious films like Syriana, United 93 and BloodDiamond, producers are understandably wary of anysense that their popular entertainments are thinkingtoo much. Shyamalan's new project was on themarket for weeks before Fox agreed to take it on,and that occurred only after Shyamalan revised hisscript, bringing it more into line with his trademarkthrillers, The Sixth Sense and Signs. He also changeda working title, The Green Effect, that might haveseemed to put the film on a soapbox.
If Cameron and Shyamalan succeed, they mayhelp extinguish a growing fear among Hollywood'sfilm writers that the best villains are all used up.
"Good villains are very complex, butmovies are afraid" of them, said Lucy Stille,who has long represented writers and otherfilmmakers for the Paradigm agency. Stillesaid that she would welcome any changefrom the tradition of pushing off wrongdoingonto some rogue individual from any group,whether big business, the police or a terroristgroup.
Stille may get her wish since the goodguy and the bad guy are about to beginmeeting in the mirror, with planet Earth atstake.
Even in The Simpsons Movie, HomerSimpson, Hollywood's favorite doofusEveryman, threatened Springfield byunleashing environmental catastrophe?As the film's trailer warns: "The fate of theworld hangs in the balance.