Darren Aronofsky’s New TV Series Breaks With The Hollywood Playbook On Climate Change
The documentaries are didactic. Former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 blockbuster, “An Inconvenient Truth,” was basically a movie version of the PowerPoint lecture series he used to describe the dangers of runaway greenhouse gas pollution. Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 “Before the Flood” chronicled the actor’s meetings with policymakers and visits to collapsing glaciers in retreat. The fiction is apocalyptic. Movies like 2004’s “The Day After Tomorrow” and 2017’s “Geostorm” depict the changing climate as the “new supervillain.”
The 49-year-old filmmaker, best known for directing psychological dramas “Requiem For a Dream” and “Black Swan,” released “Noah” in 2014, which depicted the great biblical flood in a way meant to serve as a warning about sea level rise. His 2017 thriller “Mother!” was a thinly veiled reflection on humanity’s unabated greenhouse gas emissions as told through an impassioned, praise-hungry poet who caters to the desires of a mob of worshipful guests who destroy their home as his wife watches in horror.
But now Aronofsky is trying something different. On Monday, National Geographic will air the first episode of the 10-part series “One Strange Rock,” narrated by actor Will Smith. The documentary series holds up the same stunning lens to earth science that the BBC’s “Planet Earth” and “Blue Planet” focused on wildlife and marine animals. Episodes document life in acid lakes, chronicle the organisms that cruise the jetstreams on dust blowing from Africa to South America, and show the Earth from the perspective of American and Canadian astronauts in the International Space Station.
“It is a celebration of our home,” Aronofsky told HuffPost in an interview at a New York press screening this month. “This is the great Architectural Digest spread of planet Earth.”
“Mars is a barren wasteland, yet we have tropical islands and polar ice caps and such a variation of wealth and environments that are inspiring and beautiful,” he added. “We’re very, very lucky to have it, so hopefully we can all appreciate it more.”
Aronofsky, who produced the show, said the lush shots, ranging from slowed-down video of the creation of oxygen underwater to panoramic views of the planet from space, are intended to make the complex and fragile processes that make the Earth inhabitable more intimate. At the screening this month, co-producer Jane Root quoted David Attenborough, the legendary naturalist and “Planet Earth” narrator, as saying that, to save the planet, you have to first fall in love with it. This, Aronofsky said, is his love letter to the planet.
But to understand climate change, you’ll have to read between the lines. The show makes no mention of the human-caused emissions warming the planet.
“It’s like what they teach you in art class about negative space,” Aronofsky said. “Negative space is assumed when you start looking at the beauty of the clockwork, the mechanics that are occurring in front of you.”
Confronting viewers with some of the Earth’s most astonishing ecosystems “reveals unconsciously for people, oh my gosh, this is an incredible system that we’re blessed to…
