Before the Flood (2016) on Netflix
PG20161h 36mDocumentary
Leonardo DiCaprio, a United Nations Messenger of Peace, crosses the globe to see what climate change is doing to glaciers, forests and island nations. He asks why the evidence is disputed.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb8.1/1029,787 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes75%
Trailer
Plot summary
To draw attention to global warming, Leonardo DiCaprio, a United Nations Messenger of Peace, travels the globe and sees the effects of climate change for himself. He visits melting glaciers and Indonesian forests that have been cleared, and he interviews public figures including President Barack Obama, Pope Francis and Elon Musk. The conversations cover endangered species, damaged ecosystems, the burning of fossil fuels and the idea of a carbon tax, and they return often to why so many people in the United States, corporate lobbyists and politicians among them, dispute the evidence. DiCaprio also returns to The Garden of Earthly Delights, the Hieronymus Bosch painting that hung above his crib, and treats its final panel as a picture of where the world is heading.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Before the Flood (2016)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Piers Sellers, a British-born NASA scientist who flew on three space missions, was filmed for the documentary while he had stage IV pancreatic cancer, talking about his wish to publicise the perils of global warming in the short time he expected he had left. He died on December 23, 2016.
- DiCaprio repeatedly returns to a 15th-century triptych by Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which hung above his crib as an infant and which he uses as an analogy for the world's present course towards the ruin shown on its final panel.
- To offset the carbon emissions of making a film about climate change, the filmmakers paid a voluntary carbon tax on the production.
