I admit it: I’m an adrenaline-pumping, horrible plot but lots of car chases and bar fight scenes loving, cheesy action movie junkie. I saw Armageddon … and liked it. A lot. And this morning I was watching The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift . It’s a guilty pleasure of mine.

There’s just something mindlessly numbing but completely entertaining about watching cars that I know I’ll never own driven by Japanese gangsters that are way to cool to ever talk to me. Oh, and Lil’ Bow Wow is in the movie. And you can’t go wrong with Lil’ Bow Wow.

But as I watched the cars “drift in Tokyo” I got to thinking just how much CO2 was emitted to film the movie. Most movies take months or years to film, and to get that perfect scene you have to film them over and over again. So that means more gas wasted and more pollution in the air.

So since I watch a lot of movies, I decided to do a top 10 list of the movies I think were the some of the biggest carbon dioxide emitting films of the past 2 decades.

And without further adieu:

1. The entire Fast and the Furious series - The cars may be fast, and Vin Diesel may be semi-cool in the movie, but the environment is totally furious at how much CO2 polluted the air during filming.
2. Speed - I looked up the film on Wikipedia, and apparently 12 buses were used in the filming of the movie. Even Keanu would say that’s not “excellent dude.”
3. Rat Race - This is one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. It has a great cast (Whoopi Goldberg, Rowan Atkinson, Cuba Gooding Jr., Seth Green, Jon Lovitz and more, but it’s all about racing across country to get $2 million. Whoopi gets lost in a car, Lovitz steals Hitler’s car, Amy Smart flies a helicopter and Gooding Jr. drives a bus full of Lucille Ball wannabes. Lots of laughs, but lots of gas.
4. The Chase - Before Charlie Sheen was on Two and a Half Men and a little after Kristy Swanson did Buffy the Vampire Slayer , the two were in a film about an armed robber being chased in a car by a lot of crazy people….including Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Flea and Anthony and Anthony Kiedis in a huge monster truck. That alone is a crazy amount of gas for some crazy folks.
5. Wild Hogs - I never saw this completely through, but that’s because it has Tim Allen, John Travolta, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy as non-cool, middle-aged motorcycle riding has-beens. It’s too painful to see what has happened to Allen after Home Improvement , Travolta after Pulp Fiction , Lawrence after Martin and Macy after Fargo . It’s even more painful to think of how much gas was used to power the cycles.
6. Transformers - As stated in my second post, I would love to have Transformers as our gas-free emissions vehicles of the future, but if you think about how much fuel was consumed to power the cars and robotics in the film, it would look like the Decepticons are succeeding in obliterating our world’s air supply.
7. Saving Private Ryan - I love this film, and don’t have anything bad to say about it, except that in order to be historically accurate, Spielberg had to use a lot of Tiger tanks in the battle scenes. I know that Soviet T-34 tanks were used in place of actual Tiger tanks, but that’s a lot of gas used for a pretty long film.
8. Days of Thunder - Tom Cruise as a race car driver. Tom Cruise was also a pilot in Top Gun . Tom Cruise also did a lot of car chase scenes in his Mission Impossible films. Now I don’t know anything about scientology, but I’m sure it doesn’t look favorably upon damaging the air…especially with little Suris running around.
9. Torque - This film was considered The Fast and the Furious on motorcycles, and it was a box office flop. It’s sad to see that so much gas was wasted on supposedly cool motorcycle racing scenes. Apparently Ice Cube was in it, but even he wasn’t cool enough to make this movie hot.
10. Biker Boyz - About an underground group of African-American motorcycle drag racers. Has a cool cast, like Laurance Fishburne, Derek Luke and Lisa Bonet (and Kid Rock… but he’s not so cool), and it showcases a bunch of bikes from Suzuki, Yamaha and Kawasaki. Too bad all of these cool bikes aren’t electric powered.

I’m sure there are a ton of other CO2 emitting films in the past 2 decades…heck, even in the entire history of film.

If you consider the cast and crew’s transportation to and from locations and movie premieres, and the machines and methods used to build movie sets, almost all movies are harmful to the environment.

I don’t think that I could live without cinema, and neither could most of America, but we can find more eco-friendly ways to administer the movie-making process.

Or, like I said before, if we just replace all cars and machines with Transformers, we could focus more on great films and less on the deteriorating planet.