An Inconvenient Truth
Written and directed by Davis Guggenheim
Featuring Al Gore
Presented by Participant Productions
In cinemas September 14
REVIEW BY LACHLAN MALLOCH
The last time we saw Al Gore on the big screen was that shameful introduction to Fahrenheit 9/11. Black Democratic members of Congress wanted to challenge Bush's illegitimate election victory at the 2000 poll, but there was Gore, outgoing vice-president and president of the Senate, complicit in making sure they sit-down-and-shut-up.
So our scepticism may be well founded when we now see Gore up in lights in a major feature film, campaigning vigorously for a progressive approach to global warming.
Is it a contrived piece of political rehabilitation, signalling a run at the Democratic nomination for the 2008 US presidential election, perhaps?
Undoubtedly, An Inconvenient Truth will smarten up Gore's public image. But it's worth noting that the filmmakers pitched the idea to Gore, not the other way around. He was presenting the slide show that is the film's centrepiece in various versions even before he became US vice president in 1992.
You don't have to put Gore on a pedestal to be, on balance, welcoming of this project to enlighten the general public on global warming in a scientific and accessible way. The science of the film generally stacks up well. Gore focuses on many of the same key environmental fault lines that run through Dr Tim Flannery's landmark popular book The Weather Makers.
Globally, the 10 hottest years on record have been in the past 14 years, with 2005 the all-time hottest. Within a decade, we'll see the end of the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro. The retreat of the glaciers is stark and relentless.
The permafrost is thawing and the Arctic ice cap has thinned 40% in the past 40 years. Polar bears have drowned after swimming up to 100 kilometres looking for ice on which to hunt.
Extreme weather events, like Hurricane Katrina, will become more frequent and less predictable. Without urgent action, scientists predict that some of the world's most densely populated cities will be flooded.
Gore says species loss is now 1000 times greater than the "natural background rate". Indeed, the golden toad of Costa Rica is the first species demonstrated to have become extinct as a result of human-induced climate change.
Of course all that hasn't stopped the predictable media mouthpieces from fuelling audience suspicions in the run-up to the film's release. An opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald called it a "deeply manipulative movie" with "no evidence". Elsewhere the film is described as "controversial", containing "theories".
It's true that some of Gore's shorthand phrases in the film are ambiguous. And he's excited about so-called "geo-sequestration" — trying to stuff existing carbon emissions underground — an idea that Flannery fairly demolishes.
But the worst thing about the sceptics is that they waylay our most urgent discussion: how can we begin to fix the problem?
An Inconvenient Truth is weak on this most crucial point. The film is book-ended by entirely individual actions, sitting awkwardly with the mounting evidence that global capitalism is to blame.
Gore goes as far as to say "we are witnessing a collision between our civilisation and the Earth". He urges us to question everything and think for ourselves.
One part of the film draws an emotional link between climate change and tobacco production, giving a sense that our economic system itself is cancerous.
That may be right, but the film's suggestion of individual and largely apolitical actions mute what could have been a clarion call for radical, global change.
In some ways An Inconvenient Truth is a terrific information tool. But it fails in that it doesn't steer us away from the political and economic institutions that got us into this mess, and are now doing so little about it.
The fight to sustain a habitable environment is really about challenging the power of the corporations. This film doesn't even begin to consider how we might do that.