A lot of movies about the future are decidedly dystopian – but there are counters to this genre and we could indeed call them Solarpunk movies. There is even a Solarpunk vision embedded in the latest Mad Max saga.

Here’s a look at how climate disaster culture has evolved on screen, put together by José N Cano writing for the Worldcrunch magazine:

American actor Charlton Heston is remembered as the star of Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 Planet of the Apes (1968), a post-apocalyptic film with a pacifist moral and a pessimistic view about human nature. The ending was so powerful that many people tend to forget that five years later Heston also starred in one of Hollywood’s first eco-disaster films: Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green.

The story is set in 2022, when, amid overpopulation, pollution and a lack of drinking water, the government has started to process human corpses into food: the titular “soylent green.” But while a nuclear apocalypse is not something we can completely rule out in 2024, this second scenario for the end of civilization feels more realistic today than it once used to.

“Imagining what the end of the world might be like somehow reduces and helps channel social anxiety towards the future. It is something that the horror genre is also good for, it reflects and channels anxieties,” says Layla Martínez, author of the 2020 essay “Utopía no es una isla” (“Utopia Is Not An Island”) about different scenarios that are precisely the opposite of climate apocalypses.

The narrative started to change between 2012 and 2014, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with films such as Snowpiercer (2013) by Bong Joon-ho or Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) by George Miller. “Revolutionaries triumph; they are heroes. You don’t see what they build afterward or what the society will be like, but you can imagine that there is an after,” Martinez says.

On his Pop Culture Detective web series, writer and cultural critic Jonathan McIntosh has analyzed the emergence of “solar-punk,” an optimistic kind of science fiction that imagines a future based on renewable energies or, at least, a world after fossil fuels that has learned to live with the climate crisis.

The most obvious recent example is the 2022 Disney animated film Strange World  by Don Hall and Qui Nguyen, in which settlers of a — probably extraterrestrial — world learn not to depend on a mysterious source of energy, which is easily identifiable as a fictional version of fossil fuels.

Even more explicit is Brad Bird’s 2015 film Tomorrowland, which directly confronts the optimistic vision of the future from the 1950s and 1960s with that of our present. It concludes with the protagonists explaining to the camera that changing our traditional pessimism is the first step to avoid a bad ending. The message might be too idealistic –thinking that there won’t be any major floods would lead to them not happening – and techno-optimistic. But we get the intention…

Mad Max To Solarpunk To Last Of Us: How Climate Disaster Culture Evolves – Worldcrunch

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