Post by The Ultimate Nullifier on Jan 19, 2017 22:55:38 GMT -6
variety.com/2017/film/reviews/an-inconvenient-sequel-truth-to-power-sundance-review-1201964069/
Sundance Film Review: ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power’
Ten years after 'An Inconvenient Truth,' Al Gore brings the news on climate change again in a doc that's anything but hot air.
It might be the understatement of the millennium to say that Donald Trump is not about to do the issue of climate change — or those who care about it — any favors. Yet Trump’s ascendance may wind up doing quite a big favor for “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” Al Gore’s winning and impassioned, stirring and proudly wonkish follow-up to “An Inconvenient Truth.” If Hillary Clinton were about to be inaugurated as president, “An Inconvenient Sequel” would still be highly worth seeing, but the movie, which premiered tonight at Sundance to a justly enthusiastic audience, has now been given the kind of shot in the arm that perhaps only a seething enemy can provide.
Ten years ago, when “An Inconvenient Truth” made its own splash at Sundance (and was picked up by Paramount, a deal that proved instrumental in turning it into a phenomenon), the film was most certainly preaching truth to power, but there was every reason to think that, like too many socially conscious Sundance documentaries, it could end up preaching to the choir. But “An Inconvenient Truth” was the rare documentary that actually achieved what these movies always set out to do: It didn’t just change hearts and minds — it shifted a paradigm. The movie presented Gore as a charming dweeb professor of dire environmental warning, but it didn’t just offer a message. It clanged the alarm bell and brought the news. It helped to free global warming from its pesky (and outdated) leftist underpinnings, establishing the issue as a mainstream concern in the same way that Occupy Wall Street injected the meme of the one percent into the center of middle-class culture.
For those who got it — that is, for those who grasped that the issue of climate change truly is about the survival of the planet, and maybe even the human race — the last 10 years have been a time of galvanizing hope and punishing despair. Both those spirits course through “An Inconvenient Sequel,” which once again features Al Gore in lecture mode, as he gives his Climate Leadership Training seminars around the world. But the movie, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk (taking over from Davis Guggenheim, who is still one of the producers), also takes the form of a more wide-ranging exploration of where the planet is now at, with Gore as our scientist/preacher/tour guide through everything from weather patterns to the world political stage.
The film opens with images of the Greenland ice sheets melting: tumultuous mountains of white caving in on themselves, and long stretches of green terrain where, as recently as the 1980s, there was only ice. Gore tours these areas, and updates other catastrophic patterns around the globe, which are like something out of a disaster movie or a Biblical rite of reckoning: rainstorms that no longer resemble the storms of the past, because they enter an atmosphere so much more saturated that the violent downpours are nicknamed “rain bombs;” people in India with their shoes stuck to melting streets; and the ongoing catastrophic flooding in cities like Miami that’s the by-product of all that Arctic melting — the water, after all, has to go somewhere.
Gore, now in his late sixties, strolls through the movie as a jaunty, benign, drawling gray-haired senior pedant, his stentorian tones mellowed with age, and if the film lacks the precise academic structure of “An Inconvenient Truth,” it’s a more emotional portrait of Gore’s journey with this mission — the way that, even more than before, it has taken him over. At one point, when he’s talking about how the artificial hothouse Florida environment helped to make it home for mosquitoes carrying the zika virus, so that pregnant women were ordered not to come there, he actually gets overheated with anger, and it’s a moving thing to see Al Gore as a Southern gentleman who momentarily loses his manners because he can’t deal with the outrage of how this issue is being shunted to the side.
That said, he is still every inch a politician, and when he attends the global conference on climate change in Paris in 2015, he helps broker a deal that’s hit a telling logjam — namely, the war over climate change between already developed countries and the developing world. Simply put, India doesn’t want to commit to using solar energy — it wants to keep relying on fossil fuel — because the West, in its view, had 150 years to build their civilizations on the foundation of coal. And India needs its energy now. Gore gets on the phone with the world’s leading manufacturer of solar panels, and he convinces them to make an offer charitable enough to be revolutionary. And India signs the accord.
Talk about a revolution! The most hopeful note sounded by “An Inconvenient Sequel” relates to the newly competitive costs of wind and solar energy, which are rapidly moving them center stage; that may prove a force too powerful for even a nihilistic fracking fetishist like Donald Trump to withstand. Nevertheless, Trump’s desire to trash global climate-change treaties, like the one signed in Paris (where even Vladimir Putin joined in!), is very much in the air, so “An Inconvenient Sequel” suddenly seems like a more subversive radical-underdog movie than it might have before.
Gore has been talking up this issue for 25 years now, and as the film makes clear, he isn’t tired of talking. You feel he’s got enough wind to power another sequel. What’s extraordinary is that this one, after a decade of global-warming fatigue, feels as vital as it does. When it plays in theaters this summer (Amazon Studios, which just purchased it, has announced a release date of July 28), “An Inconvenient Sequel” is likely to be another event, a part of the conversation, a movie that glories, once again, in the incisive power of its inconvenience. Ten years later, Al Gore is still bringing the news.
Sundance Film Review: 'An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power'
Reviewed at Eccles Theatre, Sundance Film Festival, January 19, 2017. Running time: 100 MIN.
Production
A Paramount Pictures release of a Participant Media production. Producers: Richard Berge, Diane Weyermann. Executive producers: Jeff Skoll, Davis Guggenheim, Lawrence Bender, Laurie David, Scott Z. Burns, Lesley Chilcott.
Crew
Directors: Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk. Camera (color, widescreen): Jon Shenk. Editors: Don Bernier, Colin Nusbaum.
With
Al Gore.
Sundance Film Review: ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power’
Ten years after 'An Inconvenient Truth,' Al Gore brings the news on climate change again in a doc that's anything but hot air.
It might be the understatement of the millennium to say that Donald Trump is not about to do the issue of climate change — or those who care about it — any favors. Yet Trump’s ascendance may wind up doing quite a big favor for “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” Al Gore’s winning and impassioned, stirring and proudly wonkish follow-up to “An Inconvenient Truth.” If Hillary Clinton were about to be inaugurated as president, “An Inconvenient Sequel” would still be highly worth seeing, but the movie, which premiered tonight at Sundance to a justly enthusiastic audience, has now been given the kind of shot in the arm that perhaps only a seething enemy can provide.
Ten years ago, when “An Inconvenient Truth” made its own splash at Sundance (and was picked up by Paramount, a deal that proved instrumental in turning it into a phenomenon), the film was most certainly preaching truth to power, but there was every reason to think that, like too many socially conscious Sundance documentaries, it could end up preaching to the choir. But “An Inconvenient Truth” was the rare documentary that actually achieved what these movies always set out to do: It didn’t just change hearts and minds — it shifted a paradigm. The movie presented Gore as a charming dweeb professor of dire environmental warning, but it didn’t just offer a message. It clanged the alarm bell and brought the news. It helped to free global warming from its pesky (and outdated) leftist underpinnings, establishing the issue as a mainstream concern in the same way that Occupy Wall Street injected the meme of the one percent into the center of middle-class culture.
For those who got it — that is, for those who grasped that the issue of climate change truly is about the survival of the planet, and maybe even the human race — the last 10 years have been a time of galvanizing hope and punishing despair. Both those spirits course through “An Inconvenient Sequel,” which once again features Al Gore in lecture mode, as he gives his Climate Leadership Training seminars around the world. But the movie, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk (taking over from Davis Guggenheim, who is still one of the producers), also takes the form of a more wide-ranging exploration of where the planet is now at, with Gore as our scientist/preacher/tour guide through everything from weather patterns to the world political stage.
The film opens with images of the Greenland ice sheets melting: tumultuous mountains of white caving in on themselves, and long stretches of green terrain where, as recently as the 1980s, there was only ice. Gore tours these areas, and updates other catastrophic patterns around the globe, which are like something out of a disaster movie or a Biblical rite of reckoning: rainstorms that no longer resemble the storms of the past, because they enter an atmosphere so much more saturated that the violent downpours are nicknamed “rain bombs;” people in India with their shoes stuck to melting streets; and the ongoing catastrophic flooding in cities like Miami that’s the by-product of all that Arctic melting — the water, after all, has to go somewhere.
Gore, now in his late sixties, strolls through the movie as a jaunty, benign, drawling gray-haired senior pedant, his stentorian tones mellowed with age, and if the film lacks the precise academic structure of “An Inconvenient Truth,” it’s a more emotional portrait of Gore’s journey with this mission — the way that, even more than before, it has taken him over. At one point, when he’s talking about how the artificial hothouse Florida environment helped to make it home for mosquitoes carrying the zika virus, so that pregnant women were ordered not to come there, he actually gets overheated with anger, and it’s a moving thing to see Al Gore as a Southern gentleman who momentarily loses his manners because he can’t deal with the outrage of how this issue is being shunted to the side.
That said, he is still every inch a politician, and when he attends the global conference on climate change in Paris in 2015, he helps broker a deal that’s hit a telling logjam — namely, the war over climate change between already developed countries and the developing world. Simply put, India doesn’t want to commit to using solar energy — it wants to keep relying on fossil fuel — because the West, in its view, had 150 years to build their civilizations on the foundation of coal. And India needs its energy now. Gore gets on the phone with the world’s leading manufacturer of solar panels, and he convinces them to make an offer charitable enough to be revolutionary. And India signs the accord.
Talk about a revolution! The most hopeful note sounded by “An Inconvenient Sequel” relates to the newly competitive costs of wind and solar energy, which are rapidly moving them center stage; that may prove a force too powerful for even a nihilistic fracking fetishist like Donald Trump to withstand. Nevertheless, Trump’s desire to trash global climate-change treaties, like the one signed in Paris (where even Vladimir Putin joined in!), is very much in the air, so “An Inconvenient Sequel” suddenly seems like a more subversive radical-underdog movie than it might have before.
Gore has been talking up this issue for 25 years now, and as the film makes clear, he isn’t tired of talking. You feel he’s got enough wind to power another sequel. What’s extraordinary is that this one, after a decade of global-warming fatigue, feels as vital as it does. When it plays in theaters this summer (Amazon Studios, which just purchased it, has announced a release date of July 28), “An Inconvenient Sequel” is likely to be another event, a part of the conversation, a movie that glories, once again, in the incisive power of its inconvenience. Ten years later, Al Gore is still bringing the news.
Sundance Film Review: 'An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power'
Reviewed at Eccles Theatre, Sundance Film Festival, January 19, 2017. Running time: 100 MIN.
Production
A Paramount Pictures release of a Participant Media production. Producers: Richard Berge, Diane Weyermann. Executive producers: Jeff Skoll, Davis Guggenheim, Lawrence Bender, Laurie David, Scott Z. Burns, Lesley Chilcott.
Crew
Directors: Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk. Camera (color, widescreen): Jon Shenk. Editors: Don Bernier, Colin Nusbaum.
With
Al Gore.