The year is 2016, solar flares have caused the Earth’s temperature to rise 10 degrees Celsius. It is near impossible to be outside during the day because of the sun’s enormous radiating heat. Literally scorching the planet, and anything that is out for more than a few hours. A few humans have survived this hellish landscape. Sisters Marie and Leonie, and two men named Phillip and Tom travel towards the mountains in a car with covered windows, siphoning gas from wrecked and abandoned vehicles. There is little to no water left on Earth, but rumor has it it still rains in the mountains. This film is called “Hell”, meaning “bright” in German. Released in 2011, directed by Tim Fehlbaum, Hell is a post apocalyptic horror/thriller movie set in Germany. It has an English dubbed version, but personally I don’t think that the emotion is conveyed the same. I tried watching it in English but didn’t get very far before I switched it back to German. Without giving away too much of the ending, I’ll just say that the characters encounter some other survivors and things get...a little crazy. It shows that in a climate disaster, the real threat isn’t necessarily the deteriorating environment, it’s how people react to it. This movie serves as a great example of what happens when people are driven to the extremes by climate change. I didn’t write my wiki post about this movie, even though it deals with the direct effects of climate change more directly and frequently than the book I read (Feed, M.T. Anderson), because this movie is in no way appropriate for classroom viewing. It is very violent and has some possibly triggering scenes of forced sexual advances. However, I do think it is interesting to compare different possible future worlds that have been affected by climate change, and this movie poses a possible future that could lend a hand to answering the question, what will our world look like as it heats up, and how will people react to it?
I am really interested with you comment about how it shows the danger of how people react to climate change. I think that it is a great point for discussion in our class and further research on.
ReplyDeleteIt is kind of scary that this movie was supposed to take place in 2016. Not being set fifty or one hundred years in the future makes the threat of climate change seem a lot larger than in many of the other movies and books we have read.
ReplyDeleteThe concept of this movie sounds very interesting, and you mentioned that the landscape setting is the result of solar flares. So, I suppose this means that the disasters are due to the sun's radiation? The question of what people would be willing to do in the midst of a heating like this also gets my attention, because it seems different than what we've normally talked about.
ReplyDeleteThis movie sounds really interesting, I also think it's good to be exposed to foreign films. American films are watched so commonly in other cultures and we rarely watch films that aren't in English because that's not "convenient." But this concept of moving into the mountains to find rain (aka habitable zones) is so interesting!
ReplyDeleteI think i would like to see this movie. Mad Max was the first movie I watched that sort of deals with these issues but doesn't really centralize around climate change..it was really good. Maybe directors and writers will start to work climate change into their storylines more often.
ReplyDeleteThis movie sounds very interesting and has a decent amount of action to shock the audience. I would love to watch this movie and see how it compares to other climate changes films in relation to the main points that are made throughout it.
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