When The Dark Knight Rises debuted, a general consensus was reached: There is little more frightening than Tom Hardy in a steampunk face mask, maxi sherpa coat, and about 30 pounds of beefy muscle. An unlikely combination of terrifying characteristics, perhaps, but it sure scared the shit out of audiences everywhere.
Now, Christopher Nolan is at it again with another unconventional movie villain: Climate change, is that you? In his upcoming film, Interstellar, Nolan shows us a (not-too-distant?) future in which the Earth has become essentially uninhabitable. What does that future look like? Well, according to Nolan’s vision, it includes a bunch of blazing cornfields and some pretty serious dust storms.
“We didn’t run out of planes and television sets,” says an offscreen voice, ominously and somewhat bewilderingly (we weren’t aware that TVs and air travel were particularly endangered). “We ran out of food.” Oh, Nolan, you and your yarns! Hold up, though – hasn’t there been some talk recently about rising temperatures and changing weather patterns endangering our food supply?
And then Michael Caine shows up to tell a dustier-than-usual Matthew McConaughey that humanity’s only chance at survival is to find a new planet. This old one is just too much of a mess, and it appears to be on fire a lot of the time! Wait a second, that sounds oddly familiar …
When the least believable part of a trailer for a movie about the inevitable collapse of an entire planet is Anne Hathaway in a space suit, that is bad news, folks. And as firmly as I believe that McConaughey’s panty-dropping drawl could make literally any bad situation better, I’d go ahead and say we can’t count on it to, say, freeze up those glaciers again.
Well, it looks like climate change is just threatening enough to serve as the antagonist of a Hollywood blockbuster after all. Interstellar will be released in theaters in November, but in the meantime, watch the trailer above to feed your generalized anxiety disorder.
