| Overall Grade: |
C |
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| Story: |
C |
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| Acting: |
A+ |
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| Direction: |
B+ |
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| Visuals: |
F |
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I wonder if Al Gore's limo was a hybrid...
by Yahoo! Movies User (movies profile)
Jun 20, 2008
13
of
21 people found this review helpful
I went to see "An Inconvenient Truth" today, and I found it to be an overall disappointment. My main problem with it was that it was supposed to be a documentary, but the movie didn't contain information that anybody who pays at least a little attention to current events involving the environment would know, it mainly connected to the audience on a psychological/emotional level (rather than an intellectual level), and it leaves out information that would have overall made it a better documentary (though this information would have sacrificed Gore's incredibly oversimplified argument that the world is heating up because of carbon dioxide emmisions).
The fact is, carbon dioxide is only part of the equation, though the film (and Gore) only harp on this one point for an hour and forty minutes. There is very little (if any) mention that the scientists have proven that the sun has heated up, or that land mass has much to do with the climate changes, or that the current warming trend that we are in started around 1850, after a 400-year cooling period known as the "Little Ice Age."
Another thing that Gore said that was obviously and blatantly false is that "Global warming is not a political issue - it is a moral issue." This is utterly absurd; first of all, Gore himself is a politician that ran for president at least twice. Second of all, Gore takes the opportunity to make fun of the Bush administration or to critique their environmental policies at least three times. Third of all, Gore's solution for global warming is that all of the politicians must together enact environmental policies immediately and change over to alternative energy sources, hybrid cars, etc. It is amazing that more of the critics did not pick up on this blatant hypocrisy.
Finally, the film tries to elicit an emotional response from its audience throughout the film. Various shots of Al Gore (basically, every shot where he isn't in front of the screen) try to make him look like an average guy who's working his ass off to try to save the environment. Other shots show him talking to everyday people, signing autographs and taking photos, like he's a spokesperson for the environment (think Lorax). He also tells the story of how his son got hit by a car, and how that made him wonder if the wonderful great outdoors will be there when his son is an adult, and his grandkids are adults, etc. How does his son being in an accident have anything to do with his train of thought on the survival of the environment? It doesn't, but Gore doesn't mind pulling at people's heart strings for some support of his policies. Another, more subtle, tactic that the film uses is that every background sound in the film that is used to illustrate the destruction of the environment (specifically, when an iceberg falls into the ocean) has about 10x the bass it normally does, so this makes the sound feel 'bigger', and by extension, the problem of global warming.
Other than these things the film doesn't get right, there are the horrible slides and unbelievably corny images that Gore uses to prove his point. The most compelling images that Gore uses are photographs of the earth, and photographs of various icecaps/icebergs/iceflows that are melting/shrinking. Other than that, his presentation is basically crappy clip art and some excel charts that he probably got from a simple google search in around an hour.
In spite of what I said above, which is all quite true, I consider myself an environmentalist. I personally think that Mr. Gore's solutions are much needed policies, specifically that we stop building inefficient cars, and that as consumers we stop using energy in our inefficient way. We need to invest heavily in alternative energies, and we need to do it now. However, I do not think that it is necessary for us to all stop driving in the name of global warming, when we should stop driving in the name of cleaner air, reduced noise levels, and an overall higher quality of life. We need to start trying to enact laws that will reduce the earth's population over time (like china's one baby only rule, but more like an America's three baby only rule). However, I do not think that a "documentary" such as this will help us to become more conscious of what's happening to our environment when it only tells a small portion of the story and seeks to turn its audience into an army of dogmatic myrmidons that don't know what they're talking about. |
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