A movie for Greenpeace hippies

It's an entertaining movie on some levels, and Dern's performance is excellent; however, your observations are totally correct--it's a circle-jerk for hair-on-fire envirocultists and hippies. The idea that Earth will ever be totally paved over and industrialized is ludicrous. The planet is in better shape now than it was in 1972, and in many ways even better off environmentally than it was in 1872. If you had grown up in the greater Los Angeles area in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, you could count the days the mountains were visible every year on your fingers, without having to move on to your toes. Now I see them nearly every day, often with crystal clarity. There are actually many times more polar bears in the Arctic today than there were sixty years ago. Things have improved a great deal, not deteriorated. If you could come back in a hundred or a thousand years to visit Earth, you would find nature teeming, vegetation and wildlife thriving. Envirodoom message entertainment is the domain of fools.

You say that as if it's a bad thing. :)

As many have noted, it's not to be taken quite so literally, but as a cautionary fable. Allegorical & metaphorical storytelling was much more common in those days; they weren't going so much for literal, logical truth as for emotional truth: the biosphere can be damaged (as it was being damaged then) & we shouldn't become so enmeshed in our technology that we lose our connection to the natural world, which we're still part of. This isn't hippie propaganda or doom-saying, but simply a reminder that much that is precious & beautiful can be lost before we even realize it, and so we should cherish & preserve as much of it as we can. Which isn't a bad message at all.

I disagree. This movie shows a future where man has already failed our earth and have resorted to creating artificial environments and one man's over-attachment to them which transgresses into his own personal zealotry to protect it at all costs. There was nothing really Hippie about him and has more in common with shut ins who shun other people and prefer their own private Idahos than a flourishing green planet.

I was also a little annoyed by the BLATANT, SCREAMING OBVIOUSNESS of this movie. For crying out loud, they're nuking cute little bunnies while Joan Baez is chanting about the beauty of nature in the background.

And I also don't believe that we're necessarily heading towards environmental doom - but we still DO have to watch out. It's possible that parts of the world are not as polluted today as they were in the 70's specifically because we stopped ourselves before it was too late, and stuff such as this movie, corny as it may have been, contributed to this change...