Several years ago, the world had the pleasure of witnessing the potential calamities of climate change for $10 and a popcorn when The Day After Tomorrow came to theatres. That blockbuster saw cataclysmic storms and the flooding of New York City after the global ocean conveyor suddenly shut down. Chaos ensued, Dennis Quaid had to rescue Jake Gyllenhaal and in an ironic twist, the surviving Americans had to escape to Mexico.
This evening I encountered another climate change movie that was a little less blockbuster but just as doom and gloom. Released in 2006, The Last Winter is set in a remote Alaskan monitoring station. After an oil company finds a mammoth supply of oil under the permafrost somewhere in Alaska, they are forced to bring in a group of environmentalists to measure the potential environmental impact of drilling on the 'pristine' landscape. The environmentalists clash with the rugged oil company folk (led by Ron Perlman, though this time not donning his Hellboy look), but soon things start to get weird once one of the workers ends up frozen and naked by a mysterious oil pipe.
Now, before I go any further, I'll caution those that have any desire to see this film that I might give some of it away below. Read at your peril. But seriously, you shouldn't waste your time with the movie...
What seems to be happening is the permafrost is warming in Alaska at an exponential rate and perhaps some 'Sour Gas' is leaking. Then more things go wrong, people go crazy, lots of folks die and the last few seem to figure out that what is coming after them is an old dark spirit known by the Inuit as a Windigo, which in the movie is glowing green and resembles some kind caribou on steroids. More people die and some get lit on fire.
Eventually, the last survivor wakes up in a hospital bed somewhere else in Alaska, only to find the small medical station inhabited by a TV showing massive flooding in North America and the hanging corpse of a doctor that committed suicide. She goes outside and is standing in a major puddle with alarms going off. End scene.
We can only infer that it's the end of the world. After all, the film's tagline is "What if mankind only had one season left on Earth?". It was pretty depressing. I mean, you didn't see her escaping to Mexico.
The film's main message seemed to be twofold. First, whenever climate change hits us, it will hit us hard and it will be bad. Second, it carried a narrative of nature striking back against us, both in its weather-related form with lots of melting and in its spiritual giant caribou form.
Despite the clear budget differences between this and The Day After Tomorrow, Hollywood still seems to only be able to pull off alarmist climate change movies. If I were in the business, I would too. Copenhagen conferences and G8 meetings probably wouldn't make for box-office hits. Then again, throw in Denzel Washington as Barack Obama and add a few plot twists involving him kicking serious global public policy ass, and you might have something.
At least this movie wasn't as blatant about the climate change stuff until the end. But it still sucked. A lot. Don't watch it.
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