Emergency viewing: 15 must-see films about the climate crisis

We are rapidly becoming the all-star cast of the biggest disaster movie of all time, and tragically it’s a global success. Towering infernos blaze over Canada, the Canaries and Rhodes, Bangladesh, China and even northern England have had their own devastating Poseidon adventures while the whole world continues to reel in the socioeconomic chaos of the Covid contagion and in fear of an H1N1 outbreak. Only the dramatic effects are no longer computer-generated, they are real, and people are really dying.

I went to the Odeon in the 1970s and was terrified and wowed by the disaster film genre. Since the late 1980s I’ve been watching the real world’s climate effects department ramp up its protests to our wholesale inactivity and disregard for the science that says, with increasing accuracy, that humanity is facing Armageddon. But there’s been another competing genre, the conspiracy/disinformation movie, the creepy corrupt B-movies released, not by Hollywood, but by big oil, not X-rated at the multiplex but woven insidiously into our lives as extras in this catastrophe… and the repeats, re-streams, re-runs orchestrated by those fuelling the flames.

So it’s time to rebel, or just moan and die: that’s your choice. The best rebels rely on good intel and need a secure base founded on the facts, so I suggest before you climb aboard your TIE fighters you watch and digest the following films. Because for all its frippery and Marvellous nonsense, some more valuable parts of the movie industry are trying to tell us the truth.

If I could add a movie to the list here it would be Roland Emmerich’s 1996 film , starring Will Smith and Bill Pullman. I know, flag-waving gung-ho Americana, but it does have one significant message to address our current and greatest ever crisis. When the threat is tangible, an alien invasion, the whole world unites to address