Three twenty-first-century disaster films, the ideology of science and the future of democratic debate

While news media representations of science and technology have received ample attention in academic research, there is a lack of comparable research into disaster films. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative content analysis, this article aims to explore the representation of science in three recent disaster films: The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich, 2004), Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011) and Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Wyatt, 2011). We find these films’ representation of science contributing to a reification of science and the promotion of the ‘ideology of science’. We conclude by discussing how this representation potentially shapes the context in which late modern risks are approached in social and political debates, and to what extent this might contribute to facilitating or impeding democratic debate and citizenship.