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Arts & Entertainment Movies FILM REVIEW "An Inconvenient Truth" (La Verdad Incómoda)
Arts & Entertainment Movies FILM REVIEW "An Inconvenient Truth" (La Verdad Incómoda) | FILM REVIEW "An Inconvenient Truth" (La Verdad Incómoda) |
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| Written by MICHAEL SHAPIRO | |
| Saturday, 27 January 2007 | |
 '' Gore has long been known politically for his pro-environmental stance, and with "An Inconvenient Truth" he makes a heroic effort to frame global warming as more a moral than a political issue. "I've been trying to tell this story for a long time and I feel as if I've failed to get the message across," he says at the film's outset. The humility and earnestness expressed in that statement permeate nearly every moment of the film. "An Inconvenient Truth" is loosely structured around Gore's traveling slideshow on global warming – much of the footage is of Gore giving his educational presentation in a theater-in-the-round setting, combined with quite a few clips of Gore addressing various audiences around the world. But interspersed with this classroom approach are flashbacks to Gore's Senate days, and to his time in the White House. We travel with Gore to visit the family farm where he spent his childhood summers. We see Gore in nature, appreciating nature, loving his family. To convey the idea that this issue is so close to Gore's heart, the filmmakers have made Gore himself a central character. And while he throws out some quips about his political battles, he's serious when he gets back to the subject at hand. He sounds desperate. He just wants us to save ourselves. Some of these personal Gore moments are cheesy and slightly overdone, but they're not ineffective. His passion is convincing, and when combined with the scientific facts he lays out about climate change, the film is inspiring. Gore presents the scientific evidence with graphs and diagrams that demonstrate the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature change. The film presents dramatic photography of the melting polar ice cap, of large chunks of ice sinking in Antarctica, of enormous lakes gone dry. And Gore addresses the most commonly heard arguments against taking action as well. The film even has a couple of entertaining moments, particularly an animated mockumentary clip from Matt Groening's "Futurama," which describes global warming in terms of carbon dioxide gangsters beating up cheerful sunrays and leaving them to rot in the Earth's atmosphere. See, Al Gore can appreciate humor. It ain't all swift-moving fun, of course, and Gore still has his dull moments – check out the rather disinterested looks among some of his young audience members. But the film is intellectual and important, and it has already succeeded in making the issue more talked about. Gore ends on a positive note: it isn't too late to do something about this, he says, and specific calls to action then appear onscreen during the closing credits. See |
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