A Monster Movie Takes On US Militarism

Earth’s Greatest Enemy gives antiwar and climate activists a film in which to find common ground against the Pentagon, writes Corinna Barnard.

By Corinna G. Barnard
Special to Consortium News

How do you galvanize opposition to something as vast, powerful and entrenched as the U.S. military industrial complex and its role in driving climate catastrophe?

Earth’s Greatest Enemy, a documentary film by journalist Abby Martin and her husband, Mike Prysner, an anti-war veteran of the Iraq War, offers an answer: Make a movie about a monster.

Design it to unite the anti-war and climate movements against  a common, No. 1, enemy.

And 20 years after former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 warning about climate breakdown in the pioneering film An Inconvenient Truth, don’t get bogged down in data.

Take a more dramatic approach, making the film so scary it’s hard to watch. But give it enough action and adventure to keep people glued. Make the substantive information you provide emotionally riveting.

This is not a film, in other words, for climate skeptics or Pentagon apologists.

It makes no show of “balance.” There are no pro-forma calls to a Defense Department spokesperson for an evasive comment. The enemy is clearly identified and it’s a behemoth with an annual budget of  $900.6 billion with Donald Trump seeking $1.5 trillion in the next round. 

Martin says Earth’s Greatest Enemy covers “two existential crises in a one-stop shop.”  She knows one movie can’t achieve everything but hopes it will give antiwar and climate activists a chance to find common ground.

Tracking the Devastation 

For two breathtaking hours, Martin, like a mass-homicide detective, tracks the trail of destruction left behind by the monster of U.S. militarism.  

Her look at its ravages can hardly be comprehensive, so vast is the destruction. 

In Iraq, Martin points her camera on the poisonous legacy of the 2003 U.S. “shock and awe” invasion, when U.S. soldiers fired  thousands of rounds that left civilian buildings and grounds riddled with bullets loaded with hazardous toxins.

At the U.S. naval base in Okinawa, Japan — which the U.S. seized  during World War II  — she joins local demonstrators in kayaks. They are trying to defend part of a beautiful bay, host to a coral reef, from becoming part of an airfield. Martin bobs around in the water with them as they heckle huge ships towering above them.

After the protest, Martin moves on from Okinawa; she has so much havoc and destruction to document and so little time. As she says, every element of the film merits its own documentary, which is what gives the movie its sweeping quality.

But Okinawa is a good example of the overall menace these bases can pose to local populations as forms of occupation. 

The U.S. gave Okinawa back to Japan in 1972 in an arrangement in which the U.S. base on the island provides Japan “security.” So the base never left. It kept growing: it covers more than 70 square miles today, with more than 30 facilities, including the huge Kadena Air Base.

The sprawling U.S. facility makes constant noise. Aviation accidents have been frequent. Forest fires ignited by live-ammunition exercises have burned acres of the island.

On top of the environmental toll, U.S. service members have committed rampant sexual violence against local indigenous women since 1945, according to All Okinawa Council for Human Rights (AOCHR), an indigenous Ryukyuan/Okinawan rights advocacy group.

A particularly heinous crime took place in 1995 when three servicemen kidnapped, beat and raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl.

Whether for raping local girls and women or raping their natural resources, the base is a constant focus of local protest. Far from seeing any “security” in the base, lots of local people find it an invasive threat.

Base Stories

Okinawa is just one of the 800 U.S. military bases on the global map that the film projects on the screen. Martin has said she assumes an untold number of other stories of toxic fallout and desecration of indigenous peoples’ land can be told about the other bases.

Meanwhile, those dotting the U.S. map yield their own stories.  

The movie treats the case of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina. For decades, residents drank, bathed and cooked with water that the army had polluted and the government knew was toxic.

In the film, Martin catches up with a woman who grew up on the base and is now compiling a list of suspicious deaths associated with the era of water contamination.

Her research takes her to a cemetery, where she looks for small headstones of stillborn babies, their status reflected by the carving in stone of a single date, “born and died.”

The film examines the military’s legacy of veterans as service-damaged people cast out into a life of precarity. The first of these U.S. military monster’s victims to appear in the film — who appears in the opening scenes — is an ailing, piano-playing vet. We watch as authorities in Brentwood, California, bulldoze the only home he had: a tent in an encampment.

The film’s message is clear: the monster spares no one and nothing. That includes Americans who’ve been subjected to increasingly militarized police since 1997, when Congress, through the National Defense Authorization Act, allowed state and local law-enforcement to use surplus military equipment for counter-drug, counter-terrorism and counter-protest activities.

Recalling Carl Sagan

Watching the film brings to mind Carl Sagan, the late, celebrated American astronomer. In 1990, he put forward a famous argument about the imprudence — even for skeptics of human-made climate change — of the U.S. government not investing as much in climate research as it does in the military, given the huge, existential risks involved.  

Given that the U.S. spent around $10 trillion waging the Cold War since 1945 against a threat that never materialized — a Soviet invasion — he said it was inconsistent not to invest more heavily in lowering the risks posed by greenhouse gases, given the high-risk scenarios involved.

“I think there’s a double standard of argument working,” he said, “and I don’t think we should permit it.” 

In 2019, researchers at Brown University’s Costs of War Project identified the U.S. Department of Defense as the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world and a key contributor to climate change, generating over a metric ton of greenhouse gases since 2001.

In 2017, for example, the institute found, in a revised report, that

“… the Pentagon’s total greenhouse gas emissions (installations and operations) were greater than the greenhouse gas emissions of entire industrialized countries, such as Sweden, Denmark and Portugal and also greater than all CO2 emissions from US production of iron and steel.”

Even so — even if the Pentagon is the largest institutional emitter — why do the filmmakers call it the Earth’s “greatest enemy?”

The reason, Martin says, is that after setting out five years ago to make the film, she and her husband discovered something. “We were shocked to learn,” she told Breakthrough News, that the No. 1 institutional ranking was based on the military’s “oil purchases on paper alone.”

When they started considering knock-on environmental effects — the film points to U.S. military pressure on Europe to build up its investment in NATO as an example — Martin says “it becomes completely unquantifiable.”

Despite all this, U.S. military contributions to climate change are not necessarily included in official emissions estimates.

In 1997, the Clinton administration lobbied for an exemption for military activity from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that set binding emissions targets — and established market-based mechanisms for reaching them — for signatory nations.

During the 2015 Paris talks, the exemption was removed, but reporting of military emissions remains optional and in 2025 the U.S. did not submit military emissions information.

Stalking the Military’s Accomplices

In her role as murder detective, Abby Martin stalks the monster’s accomplices in shiny weapons expos, “Rim of the Pacific” (RIMPAC) war games and climate conferences. Martin and her small team slip into these places with the guerrilla tactics of the documentarian and social critic Michael Moore.

None of the people in charge of these settings seems ready for a member of the press in the guise of Abby Martin. She looks and acts like a regular broadcast reporter, she fits the part. But then come her questions, which knock people sideways.

At one point, she hits Nancy Pelosi — presiding at the time over a session of a global climate conference  — with such a zinger the Democratic Party leader decides it’s time to end the session and scurry off.

In addition to this kind of entertaining showmanship, Martin offers contact with plenty of people on her side. Researchers and activists show up in the film; all of them trying to do something to protect some part of the world, wherever they are, from the Pentagon’s relentless destruction.

The Empire Files, the filmmakers’ media company, began releasing the film in August 2025 through community screenings and they are pushing now to raise distribution funding to create a splash of screenings in April, around Earth Day. 

Showings have been mainly restricted to in-person venues. However, Martin made an exception for The Palestine Museum, which hosted an online screening last weekend, which is how I saw it.

The museum — based in Woodbridge, Connecticut, and recently expanded to another center in Edinburgh, Scotland — streamed the film as part of its regular Zoom-based, free-of-charge Saturday films, most of them either made by Palestinians or focused on Palestine. 

Martin’s first feature film, Gaza Fights for Freedom, from 2019, depicts life in Gaza during the period of the Great March of Return, when peaceful Gazan protesters went up to the Israeli border and got slaughtered.

Israeli human rights group B’Tselem says Israeli forces “killed 223 Palestinians, 46 of them minors under the age of 18, and injured 8,079 with live fire.”  (And for anyone interested in following just one of the people left with amputated limbs from that Israeli killing spree, see the short film Severed about the teenager Mohamad Saleh.)

The Earth’s Greatest Enemy, Martin’s second feature, may not put Palestine in the foreground, but it looms over the movie. Martin has said they were editing the film while watching the U.S.-backed Israeli live-streamed accelerated genocide following Oct. 7, 2023.

When Gaza does appear, finally, in all its rubble, freshly mauled, at the end, it’s terrible. Here is another victim.

The monster you have been watching Martin track in this two-hour movie remains at large.

Corinna Barnard, deputy editor of Consortium News, formerly worked in editing capacities for Women’s eNews, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. At the start of her career she was managing editor for the magazine Nuclear Times, which covered the 1980s anti-nuclear war movement.

Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Correction: The location of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune has been fixed to Jacksonville, not Jackson, North Carolina.