If you haven't heard about it, it's an important film about climate change. Chances are you're either entirely indifferent or bored with the subject. You shouldn't be. You should watch the film and leave with a sense of utter, utter dread, alleviated by a glimmer of hope that we can do something about it before 2015 - after that, we all get to live in a post-apocalyptic Kevin Costner film, and nobody wants that.
Actually, the film's not that good. It makes a lot of important points but makes them badly. The boo-hiss guy is a low-cost airline director, but it's a shame that they couldn't use a Western one, such as Ryanair's O'Leary. Instead, they pick an Indian as though it's poor Asian countries which have got us all into trouble. The nuclear potato is avoided utterly and the clumsy post-fall flashback structure has been done a million times in cheap SF. Pete Postlethwaite's pretty good though.
The strength is the movement that's growing out of Age of Stupid. The live Q and A beamed direct from Leicester Square was interesting, primarily for Ed Miliband's discomfiture. He had the last laugh though - every time they begged him not to build Kingsnorth, he stressed the need to experiment with CCS, clearly meaning 'I'm building it, and CCS might happen in 30 years time so piss off' while hoping that the greens would think 'Ah, he understands why coal's bad'.
3 comments:
It just goes to show you can't be too careful!
I too came out of it a bit disappointed. Perhaps this was due to very high expectations, I wanted a rollercoaster of emotions, not that there weren't poignant bits, the sadness in the eyes of the French mountain guide seeing his environment change so rapidly, or the Iraqi kids who's father had been killed by American soldiers having pretend gun fights in their back yard with clearly a bit more knowledge of real warfare than an 8 year old should have. But what it lacked was a vision of the future.
It didn't talk enough about what is predicted to happen in 5, 10, 20 years time if we continue producing GHGs at the same rate as now. I think there was a great opportunity to do this with the case of the Indian Airlines bloke. His philosophy was that by making cheap air travel available to Indians he could bring more people out of poverty (There are certainly better ways, but fair enough if you're ignoring climate change). This could have been contrasted with what will happen to the water supply in India when the Himalaya glaciers disappear, the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers run dry and millions starve to death. This is a really important debate, should money be spent on bringing more people out of poverty or cutting carbon emissions? Richer countries will be able to adapt better to say sea level rise, but if we don't keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees they'll all be screwed anyway. Ideally both should be tackled at the same time. Contraction and Convergence is one solution to this and was explained well in the film.
The idea of moving between the different stories was a good one, it kept the audience engaged and was a good way to contrast the different stories, but somehow there could have been more clarity in the message. The film was originally conceived as a straight documentary about the oil industry, and about climate change too, then they added Pete Postlethwaite's character to introduce the different segments of documentary as if from the year 2055, and it came across like that had been the process. If they'd had the final concept from the start I think there would have been a better narrative.
Pete Postlethwaite was excellent, but we perhaps could have found out a bit more about his character to have more time to really feel what it would be like to be sitting there surrounded by all of human achievement but no one to share it with. This could have been done with descriptions of his experiences of our possible future up to 2055.
Finally though I think what you really need in a climate change film is to finish with a vision of a possible future that will get us out of this mess, so you don't come out feeling gloomy but with a real sense of what needs to happen, feeling fired up, with Copenhagen being the first major step along that path. People should feel that it's not all about giving up their lifestyles but changing them to something better. Maybe this is another film.
Still, a great achievement to get a film like this made, and will definitely get more people engaged in the issues.
er… I was going to say everything Neal did - but he's much more coherent than I am. Go to see the film though.
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