We've had The Day After Tomorrow, The Inconvenient Truth, and, more recently, Happy Feet, the hard-to-understand-why-it-was-controversial so-called "Inconvenient Truth for kids" movie - and Hollywood is only just getting warmed up! Environmentalism is taking over from the recent rash of politically oriented productions as the new cash cow.

And, at some of the upcoming movies, instead of those 1980's era 3D glasses, you might want to bring your Beagle-Boy type eye masks instead - since in these productions YOU are the new villain. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Radicalised by documentaries like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, Hollywood is due to unleash a torrent of pro-environment dramas in which the despoiled earth begins to fight back against Man.

The two biggest have just gone into production - Avatar, the first James Cameron film since Titanic, which will be released in the summer of 2009, and The Happening, directed by M Night Shyamalan, of The Sixth Sense, out in summer 2008.

Cameron's $200m film features an earth that has become so uninhabitable that men are sent to colonise other inhabited planets by force so that we can survive as a species. The film is about "our impact on the natural environment, wherever we go - strip-mining and putting up shopping malls," says Cameron. "Now, we're extending that to another planet."

The Happening was originally called The Green Effect. According to someone who has read the script, "The theme of the movie is that we'd better start taking care of our planet before it starts taking care of us," he says. "Imagine if nature was sick of our polluting ways and decided to restore Earth's natural balance by wiping us out. Imagine if an invisible neurotoxin was admitted into the very air we breathe and caused us to commit suicide in a number of gruesome ways."

Other films exploiting similar fears include a remake of the 1950s classic sci-fi Creature from the Black Lagoon, but with the monster now the result of a pharmaceutical company ravaging the Amazon. "It's about the rain forest being exploited for profit," says director Gary Ross.

Environmental destruction will even threaten the mythical town of Springfield in The Simpsons Movie, out this summer. According to the trailer: "The fate of the world hangs in the balance." - The First Post

"The fate of the world hangs in the balance..." It sure sounds exciting, doesn't it!

Documentaries can be a powerful force for change, as we've seen with The Inconvenient Truth in particular, but, and I'd be interested in your thoughts here, it seems to me that cinema, more so than other media forms, can dramatise reality with varying results. On the down-side of the scale, there's the we're-all-doomed-so-we-might-as-well-get-used-to-it apathy-generating approach that comes from heavy dosings of solution-free gloom, the unrealistic we'll-make-a-few-small-changes-and-the-problem-will-be-solved over-optimistic propaganda (an environmental hero, perhaps called 'Cleantech-man', will leap into the fray to save us?), and the overly-simplistic pass-the-buck-and-lay-the-blame-in-the-wrong-place type message that has us all feeling guilty about a situation we feel helpless to change.

While Hollywood is making the average Joe out to be the bad guy, the focus can get shifted away from political and industry considerations. The following footage illustrates this well. Several decades ago, as U.S. consumerism became a 'runaway success' after WWII, the new throwaway society threatened to engulf us in trash. The threat is still with us, of course. In fact, we're pumping out more rubbish than ever before - but what has changed since the earliest days of concern is a shift of blame from commercial influences that promote a consumerist society (political, industrial, marketing and the whole paradigm of modern capitalism), to you, the end user - the villain.

Gone Tomorrow - the Hidden Life of Garbage Duration: 19mins

Rather than devour popcorn and coke at the cinema, it might be more productive to hop off the consumer conveyor-belt for a while, and curl up on the sofa with a good book instead....