If you’d like to see Hollywood make films with more effective climate stories, please consider supporting our Hollywood climate storytelling campaign. Despite all the detailed world-building, the movie ultimately accomplishes nothing new on the climate front and, instead, risks perpetuating the stale and potentially harmful narrative of ‘doom and gloom’. Here, we define an effective work of cli-fi as a story that makes a constructive and meaningful contribution to the cultural conversation around climate change. What does this mean for Reminiscence? Not passing all three rules of our Climate Test - and passing only one of them for that matter - means that the film doesn’t make the cut as an ‘effective’ climate story. His final decision to step out of reality forever is only symbolic of this problematically self-centered mindset. The only problem he tries to solve is, as discussed above, the truth and whereabouts of a former flame - a quest bordering on obsession. The hero, in particular, seems to have largely accepted the state of the world and simply goes about his own personal ends in this world. While the climate-ravaged world of the characters features heavily in their psyches in some way, the climate crisis itself is barely an afterthought in their conscious motivations and actions. Rule Three: Does at least one character do something at least once to help solve the climate crisis?Īgain, no. This means that climate change is merely a backdrop for the film’s more conventional villains and concerns, which sadly puts the film in a similar category as movies like Waterworld (1995) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). The story itself is one of lost love with elements of a noirish whodunnit, focusing on Jackman’s protagonist as he searches for missing persons and the truth about the woman he loved. The spectacular world-building described above is, unfortunately, as far as the film goes toward addressing the climate crisis. Rule Two: Does it portray unchecked business-as-usual as the cause of climate change and as a negative character trait? It’s also a world of damaged people including military veterans who fought in a ‘Border War’ - a nod to the growing resource scarcity and climate refugees of reality. The attention to background detail is at times a wonder to behold, affording glimpses of haunting beauty in a society passing through its twilight era. The flooded streets of Miami, replete with gondolas, are transformed into the canals of Venice, Italy. Yes! As mentioned above, the film is an exercise in near-future world-building, extrapolating on present-day climate impacts like rising temperatures and sea levels. Rule One: Does it acknowledge that the Earth’s climate is changing?
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