Half-Life (2008) and Gendered Cli-Fi

One of the few cli-fi films directed by a woman, Jennifer Phang’s Half-Life (2008), focuses less on monstrous nature than family drama. But by connecting eco-disasters caused by climate change with the destruction of the family unit, the film provides a way to personalize these issues, adding relevance to destruction caused by Anthropogenic climate change.

The film centers on the coming-of-age stories of a precocious boy Timothy (Alexander Agate) and his jaded sister Saura (Julia Nickson).  Timothy’s drawings and Saura’s imaginative powers provide them with an escape from a confining home-life. Together they save their self-destructive mother (Sanoe Lake) from her charmingly manipulative boyfriend (Leonardo Nam) and finally reinvent their world in a spectacular conclusion.

Half-Life draws on multiple genres to fulfill this challenging conclusion, integrating animation and supernatural elements with generic expectations of the typical family melodrama. This story, however, literally parallels the troubling consequences of climate change surrounding them, amplifying global cataclysms from species extinction to tsunamis by associating them with their personal traumas in the home. In many scenes, a television in the background shows these scenes of destruction, clearly associating coastal flooding with global warming as the tension in the household “warms up.”

In Half-Life, the destruction of the natural world is in direct relationship with the destruction of the family. The only escape is the creation of a new world that hybridizes approaches, a point illustrated by the ethnically ambiguous family members and their friends.