Ecological and evolutionary movies

Submitted by drupaladmin on 12 October 2011.

What are your favorite movies with ecological or evolutionary themes? Fiction, not documentaries.

There are a lot of films with conservation or environmentalist themes (think Wall-E or FernGully: The Last Rainforest), and lots of sci-fi that's loosely about "evolution", hybridization, or genetic engineering gone horribly wrong (think Rise of the Planet of the Apes or Jurassic Park). I'm not thinking primarily of such films, but if folks have their favorites from these genres, by all means say so in the comments.

There's the recent Darwin biopic, Creation, of course, which I consider fiction because of the many liberties the film takes with Darwin's life (no, Darwin didn't give Emma the chance to burn the manuscript of the Origin; no, he didn't almost lose his mind while writing the book,...). It was ok, not great.

A far better and more interesting evolution movie, which is excellent but unfortunately tough to find, is Angels and Insects. It's based on (and sticks very close to) the A. S. Byatt novella "Morpho Eugenia" (included in the two-novella collection Angels and Insects). It's about a young entomologist in Victorian England, who marries the daughter of the wealthy patron of his research. Throughout, there are parallels drawn between the family life, and the lives of the insects the entomologist studies. The insect analogy also grounds the shocking twist. This is my favorite evolutionary movie.

I haven't seen Contagion yet, but I hear that it has some mathematical epidemiology in it. And Kate Winslett plays the epidemiologist, which is awesome because Kate Winslett is awesome.

Finally, this isn't a real movie--but I wish it was!

Categories: 
Just for fun