Eco Thrillers -Revenge of Planet Earth
In the 4.5 billion-year history of our planet, species death is a way of life. It's estimated that between 30 billion to 4,000 billion species have swam, crawled, walked or flown on our land and in our air and seas. Whatever the real number is, what is absolutely certain is that 99.99 percent of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct. For complex Earth-bound lifeforms, the average lifespan of a species is about four million years; about where we are now.
The real show stopper of mass extinctions on the planet was the Permian extinction of about 24.5 million years ago when 95 percent of the animals and a third of the insects known from the fossil records vanished, never to return.
We seem to sense as a species, with inevitable dramatic climate and social change staring us in the face, that something ominous may be brewing. At least Hollywood certainly does.
There are several films that are on the drawing boards and a major scifi film, the Transformers due out on July 4th, that are built around the theme of destruction of the environment. In "Transformers," robot warriors flee a planet laid to waste by fighting and land on an Earth that is at risk of a similar fate.
In the Arctic Circle during the 1800s, Captain Archibald Witwicky chips away at a massive sheet of ice, only to break it and fall into an abyss, landing on a robotic hand partially buried in the ice. He finds the eyes of Decepticon leader Megatron staring back at him, who burns a map showing the location of the life giving Allspark into Witwicky's eyeglasses. These are handed down to his descendant, Sam, in the present day and the action unfolds from there
Hollywood follows a familiar convention in several of the upcoming films: the exploiter as a big, multinational corporation wreaking havoc by its greed. In "Creature From the Black Lagoon," the remake that may be shot by Universal Pictures this year, the murderous fish-man of the Amazon is spawned by the sins of a pharmaceutical. Environmental themes are also becoming a factor outside Hollywood. In the animated "Tales From Earthsea," a big hit last summer in Japan by director Goro Miyazaki, the characters struggle to figure out a world out of sync.
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