Earth’s God should remove this from the commercial system.

It can be library-accessible. Disguised as educationally revelatory, its profitability should be discontinued.

The Bookends

The film starts and ends with footage of a nameless riverbed. Al Gore narrates.

Much like the documentary itself, these pieces are completely unremarkable. A static shot recorded thru a single camera mounted on a tripod. This includes live sound. The babbling brook, the insect buzz; that is 100% real. Unless it was faked.

Tho, if the sound’s fake, how real is the footage? 60%?

The resulting footage is home movie quality. It’s even worse because the viewer has no context. While its inclusion feels like a reminder to appreciate the glory of nature, it ironically highlights the tiresome monotony. What’s intended as revelatory comes off as finger-wagging.

A History of Earth’s Cyclones

The intellectual discourse boils down to correlation vs causation. Much of the documentary attempts to scientifically ground climate change in the scholarly vernacular. By correlating real world events to the invisible effects of global warming; the logic resembles sense.

Statistics. Charts, photographs. The death of a Chilean lake.

The tornado record in the United States encapsulates much of the film’s thrust. A correlation between 2004 being a record high for recorded tornadoes in the United States. (Located in the Northern Hemisphere, where the temperature’s rise is most severe.) Thus it’s an indicator of these diminishing atmospheric effects.

This raises larger questions: How far back do we keep record of tornado occurrences? How reliable is it? If we distinguish a pattern between rising temperatures and an increase in tornado occurrence; the discussion can end there. To suggest this is caused by the weakening of an invisible shell, a magic sun filter circling the Earth. A degradation imposed by our overindulgence in mechanical industry.

Wow. That is quite the leap.

Domain Lapse

A static hyperlink displays throughout the entire credit roll. Directing the viewer to (what should be) the lead source on scholarly development within the scientific field. A well-intended call-to-action.

The film makes twenty year outcome predictions – the doom-and-gloom sort reminiscent of religious apocalypse enthusiasts. A website would be the place to post followup developments, further evidence toward or against those proclamations.

Inputting the link into a browser takes the user to a Thai gambling website.

If the filmmakers felt genuine passion toward this ‘crisis’ the domain would not have lapsed. The public would have an historical discourse dating back to the documentary’s production.

If they cared, at the very least, they would remove the broken link from the credit roll. The passion of the message, tho not wholly committed to accuracy, overflowed into the production of a sequel in 2017.

One would think an energetic sliver can be allocated toward maintaining the original’s integrity.

Assuming the original ever had any integrity.

★★

Briefer reviews on IMDb and Letterboxd.

Check out Becoming Led Zeppelin for a strong documentary experience.