An Inconvenient Truth Review
Yesterday I watched An Inconvenient Truth, the movie chronicling Al Gore’s Quest to draw attention to Global Warming. I watched a Sunday Matinee at 4:00. There were probably about 50 other people watching the movie at that time. A surprising turnout for this area. I was also surprised by the audience reaction. Often times when a particularly poignant point was made, there were gasps, sighs, or phrases like “oh my god!”. At one point the theater erupted into a chorus of clapping and cheering. It was nice to see the movie having an emotional impact on people. I think that is exactly what it will take for people to get prodded into taking some kind of action. I might even start doing my part to help.
Now onto my review of the movie itself. I don’t think it did a very good job of weaving all the elements together. It jumped around all the time and showed video clips seemingly at random. You could argue that the director did that to break up the monotony of Gore’s presentation, but I would argue that Gore’s presentation was the most powerful part of it and breaking it up into pieces like that destroyed some of the continuity that Gore built into his presentation. Sometimes the images were not on screen long enough for me to get a good look at them. Now I just really want to see the presentation from start to finish.
They seemed to have used every imaginable format known to man to shoot this thing on. Here’s an article discussing the various formats and problems with editing all those formats.
My opinion is that this isn’t a superbly done documentary. Gore’s presentation is fantastic and the crew did a pretty good job of covering it, but the rest of the documentary isn’t really done all that well. I’m not really offering much in alternative ideas, but it could have been better.
At one point Al Gore is saying that he spends the most time trying to remove the obstacles that prevent people from taking action and that really showed through on the film. The points he brings up demonstrate that without a doubt global warming is happening and bad things will happen if we don’t do something about it. I think the movie was successful in that regard and also in getting the word out to the masses. I wouldn’t mind watching the film again, but I would rather just watch Al Gore giving his presentation. Overall, it is a fantastic piece of work but I let Al Gore take the credit and not the director, Davis Guggenheim.
At the end, they show a web address for you to visit to get ideas on what you can do. Climatecrisis.net.
The question on the tip of everyone’s tongue is will Al Gore run for president in 2008? My answer is OF COURSE he will.
“He knows that his party, and more importantly, his country, need him. He will answer the call to serve, as he always has.” –Dylan Malone of AlGore.org.
