The difficulty of understanding the seriousness of the climate crisis
By Alberto Sclaverano
The 2021 Dutch science fiction thriller Captain Nova, while simple in its plot and clearly aimed at children, offers nevertheless interesting topics to reflect on. Director Maurice Trouwborst movie was released worldwide in 2022 by Netflix, after enjoying a limited theatrical release the previous year.
By 2050, the climate crisis has brought Earth’s ecosystem close to the point of no return, and the planet risks collapsing and becoming incapable of sustaining human life any longer. The majority of life forms, both animal and plant, have already gone extinct and our planet’s landscape has started to be similar to Mars.
Captain Nova (played in this timeline by actress Anniek Pheifer) is an expert soldier who is assigned to a dangerous mission. She needs to go back in time and explain to humanity what is going to happen if they do not change their attitude towards the environmental crisis. She comes back around thirty years, reaching our world. However, the time travel device has a problem: it alters her physical appearance, making her look like a younger version of herself. In this timeline, the main character (now played by Kika Van de Vijver) looks like a teenager, while still possessing all her memory and having at her disposal a hyper-advance technology.
What she soon discovers is that the main problem is not even the military who perceives her as a potential threat and hunts her. The greatest challenge is to convince Earth’s elite that the story she is telling is true. Despite the proofs, including future incitements, that she displays, many rich and powerful people simply do not believe in her message, finding the apocalyptic future Nova is trying to avoid as too pessimistic and unlikely to become a reality anytime soon.
While this is a family-friendly film, sometimes more reminiscent of a fantasy/fairy-tale-like story than proper science fiction, it still uses a lot of tropes from classic films in the genre, starting from the time travel itself. The plan to stop a future apocalypse by coming back to the past makes us think of classics such as James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995). But while those two were movies aimed at adults, this is clearly realized to help children and younger tweens to better understand the climate crisis.
The young version of Nova recalls Greta Thunberg. The parallel seems clear, especially in the scene when she talks in vain about the danger that awaits humankind to a group of powerful people that in the end choose to ignore her warming. But she won’t stop, and with the help of a kid from today’s timeline, she will continue fighting to complete her mission.
Captain Nova can be a good film to introduce our kids to the climate crisis and try to explain, even if in the form of a fantasy story, why it is so important to deal with climate change before it is too late. It is not a movie that should replace documentaries, which will always be more useful, and it has not the hard impact of films like The Day After Tomorrow, which is way scarier, or Don’t Look Up, whose satirical and irreverent tone is unique. But it can reach a target younger than the ones of the other movies I quoted.
It is important that the next generation understands the severity of the climate crisis as soon as possible, and we can hope that they won’t make the mistake of the current political and economic establishment.
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