Aquaman 2 Sucks: Climate Change and Greenwashing in Movies
Okky Prabowo critiques the latest superhero flick Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, starring Jason Mamoa as the titular character, and questions the manner movies made in the present day tackle the theme of climate change.
(Spoilers ahead.)
I woke up from my sleep one morning feeling quite good about myself. The birds were chirping, Jakarta’s heatwave temporarily stopped; it was looking like nothing was gonna stop my fever that day. “Ko, I bought tickets for Aquaman 2 later today.” I was wrong. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, or Aquaman 2, as it is informally known, is not a good movie. No one on God’s green earth is surprised. Absolutely no one. I’d personally give it a 3/10: watch only when drunk or high. The movie itself was pretty forgettable and I’d advise everyone to stay away from it or watch James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad (2021) if you want an actual superhero film made by an actual filmmaker. Amidst the Depp-Heard lawsuits and James Gunn’s takeover and reboot of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU), it’s a miracle this movie even got released in theaters. Instead of turning water into wine, the movie turns 90 minutes of your day into an incredibly confusing experience. This movie is incredibly jarring on so many different levels. The comedy is bizarre as every character feels like a caricature of the average MCU hero merged with Deadpool on steroids, quipping at every possible moment regardless of the mood or stakes in any scene. Friends have told me they thought the CGI was good, but I just don’t see it that way. (Though to be fair, it’s probably my personal preference.) I didn’t enjoy the style of CGI in the first Aquaman either, but the CGI in that movie was pretty clean compared to the sequel. The worldbuilding is quite poor, the characters were pretty bog standard. The film uses excessive amounts of narration from Jason Momoa without any flair or style, just for the sake of exposition dumping.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as David Kane / Black Manta, the main antagonist in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
One of the key plot points in Aquaman 2 is the use of Orichalcum by the big bads of the movie. Orichalcum is a fuel source that is really energy dense, but releases a massive amount of ‘greenhouse gases’. And yes, the ancient Atlanteans who are far more advanced than humanity on the surface, and thus have probably known of these groups of environment-destroying compounds thousands of years in advance, use the human words for compounds that were termed only in the mid-19th century, but I digress. The big baddies of the movie used this fuel source thousands of years ago to progress their kingdom far ahead of the other kingdoms but at the cost of the environment! Oh no! Who could have predicted this plot twist? This is definitely not bad writing and bad world-building on full display. When I heard one of the scientist characters mention ‘greenhouse gases’ in one of the many exposition dumps in the movie, I rolled my eyes back so hard that I was looking straight up at that point. I have several major pet peeves when movies and shows mention climate change and Aquaman 2 is guilty of 2 of them.
My first pet peeve: I hate how bad movies and shows mention climate change as a way to gain favor with the audience. It’s no surprise to anyone that in recent years, climate change has become a major talking point among the general public, especially as a talking point in politics between left-leaning (climate-change acknowledgment) or right-leaning (climate-change-denying) groups. It is also no surprise to say that Hollywood and American corporations in general have noticed that younger Westerners, their target audience, have become generally more left-leaning in recent years. That’s why Pepsi put out an ad of Kendall Jenner deescalating a riot with Pepsi, an ad that was put out amidst the Black Lives Matter movement. That’s why Disney actively promotes a two-second scene of lesbians kissing in the American cut of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, but removes the same scene in the Singaporean cut of the movie as anti-LGBTQ+ laws require any movies with LGBTQ+ characters or scenes to be age restricted to people over 18, something that might cause a dip in numbers for Daddy Disney’s Singaporean box office. Mind you this is the same corporation that removed Finn from all The Force Awakens posters in China presumably because of pervasive anti-black sentiment in the country. How progressive of Mr Mickey. All of these stunts by Corporate America are just that: stunts. Everything they do is performative, simply pandering to whichever group is ‘hot’ and ‘will bring in numbers’ at the time. As a logical extension of this tactic, I believe that including the term ‘climate change’ at any point in their sanitized, corporate movies just serves to pander to the same target audiences.
A still from Elysium.
A still from Geostorm.
In recent years, movies like Geostorm (2017), Tomorrowland (2015), and Elysium (2013), all movies that are pretty bad, offhandedly mention climate change as some part of the reason for their plots; in Elysium, the earth is inhospitable because of corporate greed ruining the ecological balance of the earth; in Tomorrowland, climate change causes a catastrophe that destroys the eponymous pocket-dimension world Tomorrowland; and in Geostorm, climate change causes, well, the geostorm. In all these movies, the mention of climate change or global warming feels vague, shallow, and forced; climate change becomes some unknown, unseen entity that just ruins the world. These movies tell us that we don’t need to know or understand what specifically causes climate change, the systems that enforce it, and what we should do to combat it. For these movies, climate change is the copout that masquerades as the crux of the film; a problem to be combatted by the hero and resolved by the end of the film. It pays lip service to the progressive ideas of ‘saving the earth’ while alluding to existing problems in the real world. In reality, I would argue that these films count as acts of greenwashing. In my environmental science classes, greenwashing is defined as ‘companies exaggerat[ing] or falsely market[ing] a product as environmentally friendly’ to convince consumers that their product is good for the environment. For the movies I just mentioned, I would consider the mention of climate change and each of the movies’ subsequent implicit position of ‘save the earth!’ as ‘exaggerating a product’ (in this case the movie) to gain better favor with audience members, which leads to better reviews, which leads to better box office numbers for the company; while, at the end of the day, not doing anything tangible in reality to solve the real-world problem of climate change. Capitalism.
And this isn’t to say that films can’t incorporate climate change into a movie while not feeling vague or forced. Snowpiercer (2013) and Interstellar (2014) are movies that directly address climate change and incorporate it into the main story and its respective themes; in Snowpiercer, humanity’s attempt at solving climate change through the release of a cooling chemical into the atmosphere leads to the current snowpocalypse that forces everyone to live on the Eternal Train within their various classes, which could be interpreted as a warning about how poor environmental policy and management can lock individuals into social classes and prevent social fluidity. In Interstellar, the climate catastrophe and ecocide explored in the first act are part of the larger theme of Man vs Nature.
A still from Interstellar.
When does a film present the theme of climate change sensitively and fairly? I argue that films that present climate-related themes like global warming and ecocide as a fundamental essence of the film which is deeply rooted in its structure, plot, and pacing are truer and better films — Snowpiercer and Interstellar fall into this category for me. On the other hand, when films throw around terms like ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ which could easily be traded with any other global problem like ‘nuclear war’ or ‘human greed’, it is clear that this theme is only presented superficially and as a corporate attempt at presenting the film as so progressive and so woke. These notions of climate action and environmental consciousness are just corporate attempts at greenwashing and greenlighting their audience. Technically this doesn’t apply to Geostorm, but Geostorm is so bad that I think we can call it an exception to the rule.
The main takeaway from this rambly, long-ass essay is that you should pay attention to what you consume. Corporate America is so good at pandering to trending causes that it’s easy for anyone to get caught up in the fever of it all. We’ve already seen what I’d call racewashing and pridewashing, with the aforementioned Pepsi advertisement and Disney promotional tactics as examples that give me close to no faith in humanity and push me to the edge of thinking that we should all embrace socialist hellscapes rather than capitalist hellscapes. I don’t think we should be giving money to films and producers that think consumers are so stupid and gullible that mentioning climate change in passing will suddenly have us drooling and praising their movies as the Taxi Drivers of our time. In conclusion, pay attention to what you watch, pay attention to what corporate movies are telling you, don’t watch Aquaman 2. Please.