The Real Villain of the Disaster Movie Crawl Isn't a Deadly Alligator
"You're an apex predator!" sports dad Dave Keller (Barry Pepper) tells his daughter Haley (Kaya Scodelario) early in the new movie Crawl, as he's encouraging her to give her all in the swimming pool. The surface joke here is that the movie is about how gators, not humans, are at the top of the food chain. But below the waterline, a more ominous irony swishes its scaly tale. The alligators aren’t the ones with the deadliest appetites; it’s humankind itself we’re meant to fear. And what we consume, with our toothy greenhouse gasses, is the planet itself. In Crawl, it turns out the alligators are deliberate, light-hearted distractions. They keep us from having to confront the real global catastrophe coming to devour us all—ourselves.
Crawl’s plot is a predictable, entirely serviceable excuse for man and woman on gator action. As Hurricane Wendy bears down on Florida, Dave (recently divorced) finds himself in Coral Lake trying to board up his old family home. He’s injured by a giant gator that got into the basement through an overflow drain. Haley comes to find him, and the two are isolated by the rising waters and swarming reptiles. There are alligator point of view shots of thrashing legs, deadly bites, hairsbreadth escapes, and a mounting body count. Despite it all (alligator movie spoilers ahead), the protagonists swim and flop their way to emotional reconciliation and the final escape, minus a hunk of flesh and a limb or two.
The words "climate change" are never spoken aloud in Crawl. Instead, the film treats Hurricane Wendy as just another big Category 5 storm. But both creators and audience (well, most of them, hopefully) know that climate change makes big storms more likely and more dangerous. Warmer surface temperatures are thought to increase hurricane wind speeds. As warm water expands, sea levels rise, which makes flooding worse in coastal areas. Florida is especially at threat; some scientists believe that south Florida could disappear underwater within 80 years. A good number of people alive today may live to see the eventual evacuation of Miami.
From that perspective, Crawl isn't a disaster film, but an apocalyptic one. The images of swamped convenience stores, floating SUVs and "Beware of Alligator" signs under six feet of water are reasonable predictions of what Florida will likely look like in the not-too-distant future. At a Chicago screening on Friday night, the theater employee who introduced Crawl told our small audience that it was a "completely realistic documentary of a hurricane in Florida." He thought it was a quip—it was met with laughter— but it might just be a prophecy.
The one caveat to that prophecy is the alligators. The main danger as Florida sinks is flood waters, not animal attack. Alligators very rarely bother humans. They're scared of us, and with good reason, since humans hunted them to near-extinction. Careful conservation has brought their numbers back, but humans are still much more of a threat to them than vice-versa; 87,000 alligators were hunted in Florida between 2000 and 2015. In contrast, alligators have killed 23 humans since 1973. Crawl then neatly reverses the actual relationship between the species.
The alligators also serve as a means to make man vs. nature a bit more excitingly red in tooth and claw. You see the same dynamic employed more light-heartedly in the Sharknado film series, in which the titular tornadoes pick up the titular sharks at sea and deposit them on flooded land, on which they can pick off (understandably) surprised humans. You can't pull out a pistol and shoot the rain. In an action/horror movie, it's a lot more fun to struggle with something real and solid, something that can sink its teeth into you as you plunge the knife into its eye.
Our love of those action movie tropes, and our inability to tell stories without them, helps explain why Crawl stars alligators and not greenhouse gases. It also explains why we have such difficulty dealing with climate change.
Alligators are an obvious, dangerous antagonist. Climate change is a lot more complicated. Global warming isn't some slithering bad guy that's come to feast on our flesh. It's the cumulative effect of our own horrific choices. Dave choosing to tinker around in his basement crawl space during a hurricane is a good metaphor for the U.S. reaction to rising temperatures and rising seas. Catastrophe looms, and our collective response has been to just keep behaving like there's no catastrophe. We've gotten ourselves into a very narrow space, from which there is no escape. Then we're surprised when the water rises over our heads.
Crawl is a pulpy, goofy version of that age-old man vs. nature conflict. But climate change isn't really about man vs. nature. It's man vs. his own waste products. We are drowning—not in water, but in our own shit. A good chunk of the planet's animals are being buried in our byproducts as well; we're currently in a human-caused mass extinction event that threatens mammals and insects alike. We aren't battling large predators for survival. We're creating conditions which will kill off everyone, including the biggest apex predators. Which would be us.
At a crucial moment in the film, while the alligators are circling, Dave gives Haley a pep talk, reminding her how hard she worked as a swimmer, and how she never gave up. In a familiar,, silly but still effective scene, the badly injured Haley manages to out-swim some alligators through sheer willpower and gumption. The message is typical Hollywood: If you believe in yourself, you can do anything. The sky’s the limit.
Then you remember that our determination to do anything and everything has pumped the sky full of carbon dioxide. We've outcompeted all the other life forms so completely that we're in the process of outcompeting ourselves right off the planet. We need some acknowledgement of our limits before we unhinge our jaws and miraculously swallow ourselves whole. Action movies love to celebrate the indomitable human spirit, but our determination to bend nature to our whim, and crush those crawling things beneath our heels, is not so inspiring when all that crushing and stomping sends the coastline crumbling into the sea. We're so busy killing alligators, we've forgotten the real storm is coming.
Originally Appeared on GQ
