Al Gore’s brilliant documentary on the effects of
Global warming is a film that must be seen – this is one for screening in
schools and colleges throughout the world.
It is essentially a filmed lecture, and the story of the background to
the lecture. Gore speaks with quiet humour and delivers his points with knowledge and passion. It never sounds like
a manifesto speech – at no point does he single any country or government out for blame.
From introducing himself as the man who ‘used to be
the next President of the United States’ (a reference to losing the election to
George W. Bush), Gore is clearly in control. Much of the film allows the
environmental damage to speak for itself. Gore shows us Glaciers from photos
taken twenty years ago and then shows a slide of the same area now, which is
just barren rock with virtually no ice remaining. He shows graphs of the
changes in weather conditions since records began, and the sudden rises in
greenhouse gasses from the latest readings going way of the charts. At one
point, he rises up above his own chart on a lift-platform to show how far up
the damage is now. At one point, a member of the audience can clearly be heard
gasping ‘Oh my God’ in the shock of revelation about what we have done and
continue to do to ourselves.
There are some quite witty moments. Gore uses short
cartoons to put his view across. One such is a sequence from Futurama (in an episode
he himself appeared). Another shows how a frog will leap out of already boiling
water, but that if the water is boiled from cold or lukewarm round it, slowly;
the frog will stay until… with a dramatic pause to suggest that the frog will
die. Gore has someone rescue it – of course, for us; there is no outside
rescue. We have to snap out of the way we are superheating our environment and
help cool things down again. This is a
sober, intelligent film that challenges the US to reconsider signing to the Kyoto
agreement, (which they are one of the few nations to avoid). With the
increasing number of tornadoes, floods, and typhoons, heatwaves (including one
this century that killed 25,000 people in Europe) the time to act is now. The
first step for many will be to watch this film. It’s viewing deserves to be
mandatory.
Arthur Chappell
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