Still from There Will Be Blood.
Everyone has a favorite Kubrick film, Supremes song, or baseball player – anything whose value can be judged, categorized, or argued about in a presumed pantheon of greats. Alas, ranked lists are hard to compile and open to much debate. My best may be your stinker and vice versa. Despite the difficulty, energy films would seem to be a worthy subject if only to help understand the science, now that a global green transition is growing by the day, albeit unevenly implemented across rich and poor countries. But are there enough to make a Top 20 collection of what may be considered a dry technological subject?
In fact, the toughest part was limiting the entries to 20. One might be surprised how often petroleum is employed as a plot device to spark the action or as a barely referenced MacGuffin in a taut psychological thriller. There are also numerous compelling biopics on various paradigm-changing figures such as lightbulb and grid pioneer Thomas A. Edison, double Nobel Prize winning scientist Marie Curie, and even the singing coal miner’s daughter Loretta Lynn, whose success helps inform us about the hardships of growing up poor to make other people warm. Add in documentaries and the reach is endless.
I have at least excluded adjunct subjects, such as automobiles (e.g., Tucker: The Man and his Dream), fanciful magic energy sources (e.g., the entire Marvel/DC universe), and all things sci-fi with their fake, faster-than-light, gimmicky “hyperdrive” propulsion “starships” (take your pick). Only real energy is counted in all its multitudinous earthly forms.
No global-warming action films either, such as The Day After Tomorrow or one-trick nuclear disaster thrillers such as The Day After and The Day The Earth Stood Still, important future dystopian harbingers though they may be. Such speculative offerings need their own ordinated billing (as apparently do films with “The Day” in the title). As a warning, there wasn’t enough space for a number of honorable mentions: Giant, Hellfighters, Silkwood, K-19: The Widowmaker, and The Boy who Harnessed the Wind. I had to draw a line somehow.
Science stories are notoriously troublesome to screen. Here is one physicist’s subjective best-of list. Some are funny, some are serious, all make one think about how the world works. “Lights, camera, energy!”
20. The World is Not Enough (1999, Michael Apted)
In this third of four Bond capers starring Pierce Brosnan, the world’s most famous and yet somehow still secret agent repeatedly jumps out of massive exploding fires to keep a nuclear bomb from blowing Istanbul to bits, breaking the West and profiting the main baddy’s overland oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea. Sophie Marceau’s dreamy-eyed Elektra King and Robert Carlyle’s scarred sicko Renard may not live on the same page romantically or ideologically – Elektra is in it for her mother’s oil money and revenge, while the busted-lover Renard craves maniacal martyrdom – but they are perfectly matched as an evil tag team trying to kill the unkillable 007. An inland pipeline starts the action rolling as the main MacGuffin, until a stolen plutonium core takes over in an always perilous and predictable “Will he or won’t he?” grand finale. Despite the standard over-the-top theatrics, this Bond entry nonetheless highlights the problem of moving oil from geopolitical hot spots to fuel-challenged Western markets.
19. The Pelican Brief (1993, Alan J. Pakula)
You can start watching this never-lagging, chase-o-rama from anywhere without losing the plot (don’t they ever sleep?). The baddies in Pakula’s penultimate potboiler are an oil-and-gas investment company and a clandestine White House cabal, possibly on up to a dog-challenged US president, amusingly caricatured by Robert Culp as a presumably fictitious, unwitting sad-sack. The MacGuffin here is a speculative brief written by Tulane University law student Darby Shaw (Julia Roberts) on why two US Supreme Court justices were murdered. The eponymous brief implicates a paid-in-full financial supporter and billionaire close pal of the president, who wants to overturn an oil development ban in a protected Louisiana wetland on appeal to a restructured drill-happy court. Can Darby tell her villainous White House tale to a Washington Herald reporter (Denzel Washington) before the CIA, FBI, and everyone else following her kills her? Big Oil has never been so menacing or corrupt.
18. Edison, The Man (1940, Clarence Brown)
Spencer Tracy plays the legendary Wizard of Menlo Park, Thomas Alva Edison, who wants to light the world with the first long-lasting incandescent lightbulb. The action is not as taut as Bond or Bourne, but there is plenty of good-humored suspense as the tireless inventor fiddles with different filament materials to find the winning formula for lighted success and fortune. After lamenting his many failed efforts – Edison wrote “TA” for “Try Again” marking each failed attempt in a ledger – his famously sweated genius triumphs by resistively heating a carbonized cotton sewing thread in an evacuated glass bulb. Edison’s unwavering determination to engineer incandescent light would inaugurate our flip-switching electric world and the path to modernity.
17. Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980, Michael Apted)
Sissy Spacek portrays Loretta Lynn, the eldest daughter of an impoverished Kentucky coal miner before shining as a Grammy-winning country music star. As in the titled song, the living was hard “In a cabin, on a hill in Butcher Holler” where her daddy worked all night and “shoveled coal to make a poor man’s dollar.” Although most American coal is now shoveled aboveground in Wyoming rather than hewn under the scarred and soul-crushing hills of Appalachia, the drudgery was endless and “would start all over come break of morn.”
16. Salt of the Earth (1954, Herbert J. Biberman)
This blacklisted drama follows the life of an overworked miner’s wife and mother of three, Esperanza Quintero (Rosaura Revueltas), during a strike against “Delaware Zinc Inc.” after a blasting accident. As the strike widens, in part because of a shocking inequality between Anglo- and Mexican-American workers and men and women, the declining fortunes of the miners and their families are contrasted against an uncaring company management. Esperanza suffers in quiet anger as she desperately toils alone at home, until finding her better self as a strike leader when arrested, baby and all, with dozens of other defiant picketing women. Based on a true story and using many real-world miners and female picketers, hope (esperanza in Spanish) comes from solidarity among honest workers who “shall not be moved.”
15. Gasland (2010, Josh Fox)
Gasland is representative of a genre of hard-hitting exposés on the dangers of burning fossil fuels, in this case hydraulic fracturing (fracking) that has contaminated groundwater with methane and a witches brew of toxic chemicals near fracked shale gas deposits. Director Josh Fox states at the outset that he is an optimist, before itemizing a litany of environmental disasters resulting from injecting millions of gallons of water laden with hundreds of chemicals to break previously stable underground rock formations, including a famous wow moment that shows “natural gas drilling detective” Fox lighting ordinary tap water on fire, which helped to organize the anti-fracking movement in the United States.
14. Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge (2016, Marie Noëlle)
Breaking barriers at every turn, the Sorbonne’s first female professor, Polish emigree Marie Curie, is feared for her knowledge of the faint fairy light she has painstakingly conjured from an unknown nuclear realm, yet is only lauded abroad despite winning two Nobel Prizes (Physics 1903 and Chemistry 1911) in the deeply misogynist scientific world of 1900s Paris. Having distilled grams of radium and the more radioactive polonium from tons of pitchblende, for which she gave her life in the service to a new medical physics, Maria Sklodowska-Curie is hailed today in the pantheon of science and the Panthéon in Paris.
13. Chornobyl (2019, Johan Renck)
This 5-part nuclear disaster thriller dramatizes the tragic events of April 26, 1986, when Chornobyl Reactor 4 suffered a core meltdown after an ill-advised turbine test. The popular miniseries follows the anxious events in and around the reactor site, the nearby “atomgrad” workers city of Pripyat, and throughout the crumbling Soviet Union. Thought by some to be the catalyst that ended communist rule in the USSR, Ukraine won its independence five years later. Unfortunately, in the wake of a disaster that spread ionizing radiation across the globe, we still haven’t learned the lessons about the dangers of nuclear power – radiation, storage, and bomb proliferation.
12. Mad Max (1979, George Miller)
The post-apocalyptic Mad Max franchise spawned 4 films, starring Mel Gibson, Tina Turner, Tom Hardy, and Charlize Theron, but none hold a candle to the desolate bleakness of the original. Mel Gibson is the ever-gruff MFP pursuit officer, Max Rockatansky, content to live a minimally normal life in the anarchic world of lawlessness, gang retaliation, and oil shortages, until his wife Jessie and infant son Sprog are killed by a motorcycle gang. Cue the biblical revenge of one seriously pissed-off, fuel-challenged, ex-policeman vigilante. A hyperactive action film at its core, Mad Max satisfies both the non-stop thrill needs of those with limited attention spans and the more curious navel-gazing eschatologists wondering if we are in fact approaching the last days.
11. Nice Guys (2016, Shane Black)
The laughs come a mile a minute in a rough-and-tumble gumshoe ride through the streets of Los Angeles without a seatbelt. Amid all the one-upping male revelry, one can be forgiven for forgetting that gasoline fuels this rapid-fire period piece of corporate greed, parental abuse, and childhood rebellion. Not many movies (if any) use the highly polluting, incomplete combustion of gasoline-range hydrocarbons as a plot device, but Detroit automakers were never so scary, nor Justice Department honcho Kim Bassinger, hell-bent on saving a free-wheeling, open-road car culture even at the cost of her own daughter’s life. Despite the best efforts of heavy-hitting former cop turned enforcer Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) and single-parent private eye Holland March (Ryan Gosling) to expose a piston-popping conspiracy at the heart of American capitalism, the ‘70s gas-guzzling road behemoth remains king.
10. The Strangest Dream (2008, Eric Bednarski)
The Strangest Dream tells the story of Polish-born British physicist Joseph Rotblat, who courageously left the secret atomic-bomb-building Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in World War II, because of its intention to deploy the first weapon of mass destruction even after Germany ceased to be a threat. Never wavering in its stark warning about the horror of reopening Oppenheimer’s deadly box, this documentary confronts the planet-annihilating result of stockpiling and maintaining tens of thousands of nuclear bombs at the ready. Roblat’s message is told to any who will listen: “If you want peace, prepare for peace.”
9. If You Love This Planet (1982, Terre Nash)
In a passionate and plain-talking lecture, pediatrician Dr. Helen Caldicott chillingly lists the effects of using nuclear weapons as she cites Einstein’s E = mc2 equation, casualty statistics in Hiroshima, and the madness of trying to win a no-win nuclear confrontation. At a time when nuclear-arms treaty talks were failing amid rising arsenals in the United States and Russia, Caldicott calls for the eradication of nuclear weapons and asks the simple question, “How many times can you kill a human being?” Her recasting of the ultimate military strength as an unparalleled catastrophe rouses everyone to think again about the insanity of war and the ongoing pursuit of even more destructive power within a lethal, mysterious atom.
8. The China Syndrome (1979, James Bridges)
Some think nuclear power made fission safe after the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as presented by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1953 UN “Atoms for Peace” speech. The China Syndrome undoes all the warm-and-fuzzy, physics-loving redemption in 122 minutes of nail-biting drama over the state of a malfunctioning reactor outside Los Angeles. Jack Lemmon is at his frayed and twitching best as the nervous nelly shift supervisor trying to blow the whistle about a potential meltdown over dodgy weld radiographs, while dogged TV news reporter Jane Fonda pushes him to reveal the truth in a live reality-show-style confession. Released just 12 days before a partial meltdown and radiation leak at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, resulting in mass evacuations in the area, no film had ever helped to change a country’s energy policy before, effectively stopping all new reactor construction in the US nuclear power sector for 45 years.
8. How Green was my Valley (1941, John Ford)
A 60-year-old Huw Morgan (Roddy McDowall) looks back at his idyllic childhood as the youngest of 7 children in the fictional south Wales coal-mining town of Gilfach Goch, before industrial pressures turn his and the Morgan family’s world upside-down. Huw’s five older brothers all work at the local mine, subject to the daily stresses over wages, security, and safety. Maureen O’Hara is Huw’s beloved sister Angharad, who reluctantly marries the mine owner’s son and suffers through a loveless marriage, while Walter Pidgeon is the idealistic village pastor Mr. Gruffydd, valiantly trying to guide his parish through the perfidy of late Victorianism while hiding his love for Angharad amid a dark and dreary world of gossip, grime, and inevitable mine disaster. The film was awarded the best Oscar over Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon.
6. The Price of Coal: Meet the People, Part I (1977, Ken Loach)
Before his grittier and socially biting dramas that ooze with the obvious pain of their put-upon characters, this early Loach offering is a satirical laugh fest as a local Yorkshire colliery prepares for a 2-hour official royal visit by the Prince of Wales. Ultimately more subversive in the message that we are all slaves to the man, workers are ordered to paint bricks that don’t need paint, berated for their salty “nautical” language, directed on proper bowing protocol, and chastised for skiving and joking on the job by hapless yes-men bosses keen to ingratiate themselves before their aristocratic betters. Here we see behind the curtain of administrative obsequiousness to understand that a job should never hollow out one’s dignity. A tour de force of fun and farce.
5. Matewan (1987, John Sayles)
Matewan is an impoverished mining town in West Virginia, where labor unions fight for basic rights from yet another unsympathetic and profit-obsessed coal company. The tension is rife from the off, as a coal-blackened and coughing miner lights a blast fuse inside a dark, claustrophobic mine. Based on real events from the 1920s, men are treated as little more than equipment and forced to buy at the company store with company scrip, while illegal evictions are rampant, setting off another clash in a long line of twentieth-century coalfield battles. Clandestine union meetings, rousing teen sermons, nocturnal gun fights, and Hatfield-McCoy grudges appear amid a ticking time bomb of confrontation, as explosive as the trapped coal gas underneath.
4. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick)
Wildly satirical, sardonic, and serious, this unparalleled portrayal of impending nuclear madness hopefully never comes to pass. Kubrick’s comic genius can be summed up in one crazy moment of delirium, when the US President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) instructs his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Buck Turgidson (sublimely played by George C. Scott) and the Soviet Ambassador Alexei de Sadeski (Peter Bull), who are engaged in fisticuffs: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” A showcase for the enormous talents of Peter Sellers, who plays Muffley, British RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, and the eponymous, wheelchair-bound, former nazi war expert Dr. Strangelove, we must remember that 60 years on we are still just 20 minutes from doom.
3. There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Anderson)
Oil prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) delivers the prize-winning line in this darkly gritty epic as he explains the challenging nascent business of oil exploration to a seemingly naïve rural pastor Eli Sunday (Paul Dano): “If you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake and I have a straw and my straw reaches across the room starts to drink your milkshake, I drink your milkshake! I drink it up.” Thus begins a battle of wits and bravado between two stubborn soul searchers trying to win land and converts for God and capitalism during southern California’s early oil boom in Paul Anderson’s multi-award-winning adaptation of social critic and writer Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! Full of endless empty horizons and gushing derricks, Plainview stoops so low as to employ an orphan as his adopted-son sales sidekick in his relentless pursuit of wealth.
2. Wild River (1960, Elia Kazan)
A stunning drama about the 1933 flooding of the Tennessee River by the Tennessee Valley Authority, with Chuck Glover (Montogomery Clift) as a New Deal TVA man sent to remove the last of the island holdouts in the proposed flood area for a new dam. Recently widowed mother Carol Baldwin (Lee Remick) is no match for Glover’s sophisticated city style, but can she hook him on her own rural charms as well? In her determination to hold back modernity, Baldwin’s immovable grandmother Ella Garth (the incomparable Jo van Fleet) would rather drown on her hard-won land than let her memories be swallowed up in the name of progress: “I like things running wild like nature meant. There’s already enough dams locking things up. Taming ‘em and making ‘em go against their natural wants and needs. I’m agin dams of any kind.”
1. Three Days of the Condor (1975, Sydney Pollack)
An energy film both for the covert Middle East oil MacGuffin and high-stakes chemistry between CIA book reader Joseph Turner (Robert Redford) and his oddly pliant kidnappee Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), who literally become tied together in a battle of wits and nerves. After returning with lunch to his secret Manhattan cypher station, where he reads literary texts to decode possible hidden messages, Turner finds everyone dead and bolts for his life, taking an initially bemused Hale along for security. A love test between first-date wannabees or a life-and-death necessity for the spooked spook (codenamed Condor)? Can Turner and Hale turn the page from lust to love? Is three days enough to know someone?
