What maniac jumbo sharks can teach us about climate change

Recognize reality and adapt—or get eaten.

It’s a shark world and we all just swim in it. Source: Sofie Gheysens/Netflix

This article contains spoilers for the movie Under Paris.

As thousands of athletes compete for a shot at the 2024 Paris Olympics this week, a new wildly popular Netflix movie is shining a light on the event’s struggles with climate change and pollution—albeit in the most absurd, blood-thirsty way possible.

Under Paris, which had the most successful launch for a non-English language film in Netflix history, is both a genre thriller and a political satire in the vein of Don’t Look Up—except instead of a world-destroying comet, it uses homicidal sharks as its metaphor for a climate disaster that everyone in power is inexplicably ignoring. It’s the new, better-made Sharknado. (Or Sharknadeau, as NPR reviewer Linda Holmes dubbed it.)

The film begins with marine biologist and climatologist Sophia Assalas (Bérénice Bejo, from The Artist) tracking a mako shark named Lilith near the Great Pacific garbage patch, a real place in the Pacific Ocean polluted by 79,000 tons of plastic garbage. But much to Sophia’s surprise, Lilith has rapidly grown into a super-shark 7 meters (23 feet) long. When her team of scientists dive into the water to try to figure out why, Lilith eats everyone except Sophia.

Three years later, a group of environmental activists alert Sophia that Lilith, a saltwater shark, is inexplicably swimming in the Seine, a freshwater river. Later, they learn the reason why: climate change and pollution have caused her to evolve and adapt to new conditions.

Lilith’s presence in the river is incredibly dangerous, because in one week the Paris Olympics is slated to begin with a triathlon in the Seine.  

Under Paris goes on to follow all the good tenets of any good disaster movie. Scientists try to warn officials that Lilith is going to kill a lot of people; officials ignore them because they’re concerned about politics and finances; and a lot of people ultimately wind up dead. 

It’s the movie’s most accurate metaphor for how climate change is playing out today—but it’s not the only one.

Lilith, of course, is completely imaginary; climate change is not turning sharks into freshwater-swimming, man-eating maniacs. In fact, in real life, scientists have found that the climate crisis actually makes sharks less likely to attack prey.

But animals really are mutating because of climate change. Dark-colored dragonflies are becoming lighter to absorb less heat, and fish in warming seas have moved into deeper water. Researchers have even found that rising temperatures are changing how animal brains develop, altering their behavior at the level of individual neurons.

While there are no sharks in the Seine in real life, the river does hold real threats to swimmers—who are actually expected to swim there for a triathlon and marathon in the 2024 Olympics. For one, there is so much pollution in the Seine that swimming in the river has been illegal since 1923. Real-life Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has assured people that the Seine will be safe to swim in because France spent at least $1.5 billion cleaning the river water. And yet, despite these efforts, recent tests showed that E. Coli levels are still three times higher than the standards set by World Triathlon, according to CNN.

But pollution is not the main concern of the real-life athletes competing in the Paris Summer Games. It’s extreme heat driven by climate change. According to a report published this week by the British Association for Sustainable Sport (BASIS), Paris temperatures have risen 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the last time the city held the Olympics in 1924.

In the most recent Summer Games in Tokyo, which are the hottest Olympics on record, about 1 in 100 athletes suffered heat-related illnesses. One of those athletes was Russian tennis player Daniil Medvedev, who told an umpire: “I can finish the match but I can die. If I die, are you going to be responsible?”

In fact, unlike the fictional triathletes in Under Paris, real-life Olympic athletes know how much danger they’re in from climate threats. “We do all get in that water knowing that people have died from the heat,” said Olympic marathon swimmer Amber Keegan in the BASIS report. “It's not something to be trifled with.”

Source: Netflix

In Under Paris, the mayor is explicitly warned about the threat to swimmers from the man-eating sharks. “Your little PR stunt will turn into a massacre,” Sophia tells the movie-mayor, who bears a passing resemblance to real-life mayor Hidalgo.

Hidalgo, too, has been warned about the threats, but she and Olympic officials have decided to press on. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) told Reuters that they had planned the competition schedule “carefully to prevent heat-related illnesses.” Specifically, local organizer Paris 2024 told NBC that they would offer free water, and that France’s meteorological agency would be part of the Games’ operation center, allowing for adjustments to the schedule.

This is better than nothing, but it is nowhere near the seismic shift that experts say is needed to adapt to a rapidly heating planet. As temperatures continue to rise, athletes, sports fans, and workers are at risk for dehydration or heat stroke—one of the leading causes of sudden death in sports. Some sports organizations recommend that the Summer Olympics should be moved to a different time of year, or to cooler regions of the world that are less likely to experience extreme heat.

It’s not just the Games either—all outdoor stadium events are in danger because of the climate crisis. Over the past 25 years, 68 American football players have died from heat stroke. During the 2022 World Cup, 400 to 500 workers died while building the stadium in Qatar’s extreme summer heat. And last summer, one fan died and thousands suffered from dehydration at a Taylor Swift concert during a heat wave in Brazil.

“So far, the strategy around managing heat at big sport events and big festivals is to make sure the medical team is ready to hand out water,” Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto, told HEATED for our story on the deadly Swift concert. Instead, Orr said that organizers need clear guidelines on when to cancel events due to climate dangers.

But seeing that the 2028 Games are in Los Angeles, California, where summer temperatures can rise above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38°C), that’s not happening anytime soon. So far, officials are more comfortable setting carbon emission targets, and taking small steps that don’t drastically alter the incredibly lucrative sports world.

That is not what happens in Under Paris, because that would be an extremely boring movie. Instead, the mayor calls the army, who shoot the sharks with machine guns. This is fun to watch, but ultimately useless, because the sharks have mutated into bullet-proof, bomb-proof machines of death. 

Right before all this goes down, Sophia tries to get the mayor to cut their losses. “Do you not understand what’s happening? A dozen dead, and it could be hundreds!” Sophia shouts at her. “You just have to cancel, it’s not complicated!”

And that’s the beauty of disaster movies. In Under Paris, it’s obvious that the mayor should cancel or move the triathlon, instead of letting the athletes jump into the water like shark bait. But in real life, when the threat is climate change and pollution, billions of dollars, millions of viewers, and over a century of tradition makes things seem more complicated. So is it really that far-fetched that the Under Paris mayor is more concerned about money and media coverage than about people being eaten? 

The consequences of the fictional mayor’s decision are fatal and far-reaching. Sharks kill everyone except Sophia, who is left alone in a rapidly flooding city.

The ending subverts the disaster movie genre; usually, the heroes find some way to survive in a changed world. Not this movie. As the end credits roll, a map shows sharks spreading from Paris to London, New York, Bangkok, Venice, Tokyo, and eventually, across the entire world.  

If there’s a lesson to be taken away from this, the movie tells you what it is right in the beginning. It opens with this quote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” The characters in Under Paris don’t adapt quickly enough. Hopefully, we fare better.

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Further reading:

• ‘Under Paris’ Director on Whether Netflix’s Shark Hit Will Get a Sequel and How the Movie Takes Aim at the Olympics. Variety, June 2024.

“The whole idea was to take what we observe in French society and from politicians and caricature some of it. The funny thing is that all the dialogue in the film is pulled from actual speeches and comments made by different political figures, including Anne Hidalgo and Valerie Pecresse (head of the council of the Ile de France region). We just changed the context for all of them.”

• Olympic hopefuls speak out about fears of severe summer heat in Paris. NBC, June 2024.

Paris organizers have put an emphasis on reducing the carbon footprint of the Olympics. As part of that effort, geothermal cooling and natural ventilation will replace traditional air conditioning in the Athletes’ Village. The village will become permanent housing for Parisians after the event.

Pragnya Mohan, a Olympic hopeful triathlete from India, said the lack of AC could challenge athletes. “They cannot stay cool and cannot recover fast. So I think from an athlete’s perspective, that is a negative. But you know, from the green perspective, that’s a positive,” Mohan said.

• ‘The eyes of the world are on this race’. Paris Olympics’ triathlon hangs in the balance over E. Coli levels in the Seine. CNN, June 2024.

In a statement to CNN, the city of Paris said that recent grey and rainy conditions have had a “major impact” on the Seine’s water quality. A lack of sunlight – which would normally help to kill bacteria – has also contributed to the poor quality, they said earlier this month.

They added: “It is only when summer conditions (strong sunshine, high temperatures, prolonged absence of rain) become established that the Seine will gradually return to its ‘summer’ appearance, and that we will see a gradual and significant improvement in water quality.”

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