Top 10 Most Environmentally Unfriendly Films

This countdown contains no CFCs.

10. Reign of Fire
Based on the premise that constructing a new London Underground line leads to waking dormant dragons, Reign of Fire gets progressively more ridiculous from that point onwards. With a legion of fire-breathing monsters laying waste to pretty much the entire world, it is left to the few remaining humans to slay the beasts. By the end of the film pretty much everything is dead, the environment ruined, and Christian Bale’s career is hanging one-handed off a cliff like a starving man with a Mars bar in his back pocket.

9. The Happening
Not since Evil Dead have trees been given such a bad rep. In tactics reminiscent of the Bush administration’s War On Terror, M. Night Shyamalan’s depiction of misanthropic shrubbery succeeds in creating blind terror out of nothing, with grass suddenly developing the ability to exude an airborne neurotoxin when it’s feeling a bit pissed off. Intended as some kind of smart-arse allegory, all it does is make the more impressionable members of the audience completely terrified of anything green, leading to gardens being patioed over and marijuana stashes being smoked with wild abandon. Killer grass is also an oft-touted explanation for most of England’s post-1966 World Cup matches.

8. Independence Day
Not an obvious choice this, until you consider that the aliens are coming to destroy Mother Nature and rape and pillage our planet for all its natural resources. Luckily humankind has a solution: big, fuck-off nukes. Yes, in an attempt to save our planet from invasion we turn to the only natural solution, launching a wave of nuclear attacks at one of the alien ships, which unfortunately leaves them with nary a scratch while having the unpleasant side effect of melting the faces off any unlucky bystanders and making that particular part of Earth completely uninhabitable for a sizeable chunk of the next century.

7. Judge Dredd
Following several atomic wars on Earth during the late 21st-century, most of Judge Dredd’s world is a barren atomic desert in which ‘Mega-Cities’ have been built to harbour most of the remaining populace. Outside lies harsh terrain and almost certain death, with one particular desert in North America referred to as the ‘Cursed Earth’. Retired Judges, the arbiters of law in the city, have to take ‘The Long Walk’, heading out into the Cursed Earth with only a gun and a weird great coat for company. IKEA allegedly operates a similar redundancy package for its checkout staff. The rule then is simple: if you want Gala Bingo to be part of your future, lay off the environment.

6. The Matrix
If you’re going to make sentient machines capable of making a slave race of humankind if their scruples go a little awry, the safest best is to not make them solar powered. Give them batteries or something. Suffering from a case of Independence Day-itis, humans once again ‘scorched the sky’ (in layman’s parlance, cover it in big black cloud things that block out the sun and kill all vegetation, an idiotic short-sighted desperate move if ever there was one) to try and power down their robotic rivals. Again, this was a bad idea, with the robots turning to the humans as their power source, harvesting them for their body heat, ironically turning them into batteries. See what happened there?

5. Twelve Monkeys
Not all environmental apocalypses rely on fire or nuclear weaponry. The Earth in Twelve Monkeys is addled with a deadly virus, forcing the surviving remnants of humanity underground. Fortunately Bruce Willis is on hand to stop things going Pete Tong… or is he? Before this film the worst Terry Gilliam had subjected the environment to was an oversized cartoon foot, but with this movie he shows us that damaging the environment is not all about killing plants.

4. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Perhaps the most obvious entry on this list, what with Skynet and the robots and the nuclear bombing of the entire planet leaving humans to either a) cook to death in the initial attacks, b) starve to death or c) watch fire burning in broken TVs (see the original Terminator for that reference). All of this because the Terminator was sent back in time and left his arm behind, which was then found and allowed the original first chips to be made which then created Skynet. Following me? Just worry about the trees.

3. Godzilla
Goojeera! Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Genetic Mutations. One of the most successful movie stars of all time, Godzilla is the indirect result of those worrisome scientists taking liberties with natural selection. Darwin would have laid a brick if he’d seen what one small nuclear explosion could do to a regular lizard egg. Cue more sequels than the Police Academy franchise coupled with retrospective pseduo-critiques on post-WWII Japanese culture by people with names like Plato and Marjorie.

2. Waterworld
The polar ice caps have melted. Dry land is now a myth, a myth perpetuated by men with gills. One of these men with gills is Kevin Costner. His nemesis is Dennis Hopper. Surely this is some kind of hell. Also, with the environment trashed, you’d think it would be treated as some kind of sacrosanct religious entity, yet apparently petrol is now more of a commodity than it ever was. Those tricksy humans, will they ever learn?

1. Moby Dick
If there is one story that encapsulates the delicate balance between supposedly intelligent man and his environs, Moby Dick is it. Madman vs. Albino Whale - it’s a classic face-off, especially when Gregory Peck is batting for Team Humanity. Priapic harpoons and all sorts of bollocks about whaling techniques aside, Moby Dick illustrates the tension between the contemporary obsession with the environment versus our almost complete disregard for it better than anything that has come since.

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