From Silent Runningto The Matrix, Hollywood has always had a vivid imagination when it comes to Armageddon
WHETHER Andrew Stanton likes the idea it or not - and it seems he doesn't - Wall-Eis set to become one of the great ecological disaster movies. It is, perhaps, puzzling that, despite cinema's addiction to the apocalypse, film-makers have never been too keen on depicting environmental meltdown.
Aliens may have ravaged the planet in Invasion of the Body Snatchersand Independence Day. Sentient machines threatened civilisation in The Matrixand 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Too many nuclear wars have obliterated too many movie universes to mention. But overpopulation, depletion of the Ozone layer and global warming have always seemed a little, well, gradual for the pictures.
Roland Emmerich's enjoyably ridiculous The Day After Tomorrowsolved that problem by having climate change occur over a weekend. The financially catastrophic Waterworldused global warming as an excuse for nautical mayhem.
In recent months, M Night Shyamalan's The Happeningoffered us a fantastic, though preposterous take on creeping environmental meltdown. None of those films secured a place in the End of the World Canon.
The few classics of the genre emerged in the aftermath of the mild ecological panic launched by such environmental jeremiads as Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring. Richard Fleischer's durable Soylent Green(1973), depicting a world where overpopulation and pollution have annihilated capitalism, still sends a few chills down the spine today.
Logan's Run(1976) used the risk of overpopulation as the basis for a plot in which society demands that everyone over 30 is ritually slaughtered. But the best film dealing with the aftermath of man's destruction of nature remains Douglas Trumbull's mighty Silent Running.
Made in 1972, the film sees Bruce Dern being sent into space with some of the last remaining examples of plant life on Earth. One of his friends is a cute little robot droid that continues to work away after Bruce and all his fellow humans have gone . . .
Hang on! That sounds familiar.
