Each year, the Earth Island Journal takes time out from raking muck to scan the silver screen in search of films with honorable environmental messages. Here are the winners of our 1999 Green Screen Awards.
The Matrix (Warner Bros.)
Beneath its stylish eye-popping special effects, The Matrix was built on a stunning premise: In the process of creating a global technopolis, humanity destroys the global ecosystem. Air, water and land are poisoned and the trees have all died. But the machines survive - millions of them - and they are all dependent on electric power.
With the world's oil gone and the sun obscured by a pollutants, the machines need a new source of power to survive. The solution? The cunning machines conspire to warehouse billions of comatose humans in subterranean chambers where their brainwaves are used to generate the power they need.
The Matrix of the title refers to a hallucinatory projected virtual reality created by the machines to keep humanity from discovering the Horrible Truth.
The Matrix was a brilliant metaphor for human exploitation in a media-dominated corporate world.
Fight Club (20th Century Fox)
"You are not your job. You are not how much you have in your bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis." A subversive, bare-knuckled assault on the facade of empty materialism. Now if the screenplay had only offered a more positive avenue for achieving a positive self-identity. As Joe Hill might have said: "Don't bob-and-weave: Organize!"
The Iron Giant (Warner Bros.)
A lovable mechanical hunk from outer space with a heart of green encounters the worst of nuke-rattling Cold War patriotism. In an environmentalist's dream, the Iron Giant not only saves a small town from nuclear annihilation, he also eats cars!
The Brown Screen Award
This award goes to the "Least Environmentally Sensitive Film" of 1999.
You've Got Mail (Warner Bros.)
Corporate take-overs with a human face (in this case, Tom Hanks'). In this sappy celebration of franchise fascism, perky Meg Ryan loses her mother's locally owned human-scale bookstore to a huge megabucks national chain that sets up shop across the street and drives her out of business. What's the message here? The death of small-town values is inevitable. What's the moral? If you submit to the New World Economic Order you'll be happier - and a movie star might even fall in love with you.
Green Screen Awards