Written and Directed by Martin Durkin
Now, I'm a person that is proud of the fact that I try to keep current with most world events, and like so many other people in the world, I watched Al Gore make a compelling argument for the reduced usage of oil and energy in general, and watched him present his statistics and "facts" about how global warming is something that everyone is causing, and everyone can change something to start to prevent. Now, I'm not one of these people that takes their facts from a movie, and lives and dies by them, but at the same time, if a movie makes a compelling argument for something, I tend to check out more facts about it. Since I have no professional interest in a lot of the fields I find interesting personally (religion, economics, environmentalism, politics, etc) and most of these fields would require me to take them up full time to have a professional level opinion, I usually take the information I've found and make a semi-educated decision.
So when this movie comes along and agrees with Gore, to a point, I'm inclined to believe it, and after reading more about the subject, even only a night's worth, I'm actually more inclined to believe the people that made this documentary over Gore. Still, as I have explored in my other documentary reviews, the form of documentary itself distorts the facts at hand by presenting them, edited, by another person. How is the viewer to know if the person making the documentary is biased or has an agenda of their own to push? We can't know, the only way to figure out for sure is to make the subject our life's work, which I don't plan on doing.
People will rebut, and provide evidence of manipulation by documentary makers, by posting or publishing material written by yet another person. Since the person presenting this evidence is supposedly fighting a bias, how do we know the evidence they are posting isn't the work of yet another person with a bias? We can't. Like I said, the documentary form is made to present ideas, which we can think on and draw our own conclusions, as wrong or right as they may be.
Since I'm into this subject, let me bring up a few points this movie makes, without judging their possible bias or agenda. First, the main point of the film is to contend that human Carbon Dioxide (C02) is not the cause of global warming. Not a scientist here contends that global warming isn't real. It most certainly is, anyone with a thermometer and a notepad, or access to a computer with stats on the weather can tell you that. They are merely saying that CO2 is not the main cause of global warming, that volcanoes, animals, and dead vegetation produce around 150x the amount of CO2 that humans create with vehicles and industry. Is this "fact" correct? Who knows, this is where our own theories and feelings and research comes into play in our decision making process.
Also, the film contends that the reason that the international feelings on the subject are the way they are (saying that human industry and cars are the cause) is because of the propaganda distributed by people like Al Gore. They claim Al Gore has all his facts right, he merely doesn't present them like he should. They say they've found evidence that Temperature changes first, (Al Gore's red line in AIT) and that in turn causes CO2 levels to change, although 800 years later. They say the 800 years later is the part Gore leaves out.
Why would Al Gore, a bleeding heart liberal, do this? To further his own cause? Well, partly, they contend, and because the mania around global warming has created so many jobs, and such an international climate (no pun) of awareness, that if it were disproved, it would destroy many economies. The makers of this film also say that the stoppage of oil use and industrial progress will doom third world countries to live like they are forever. If we stop our own usage and production, how are they ever supposed to progress? This is a logical point, that I agree with.
That's the basic argument of the film, that due to political reasons, the actual truth has been obscured by people like Al Gore. Well, in backlash to this film, and audio/visual lecture (not unlike Gore's) explained that the filmmakers used improper and outdated (by 20 years) data to purposely deceive its viewers. That's all well and good, but you have two sides saying the other is wrong, and at the same time saying "believe my data, not his!" so who is the viewer to trust?
As I said before, no one. You can only trust your own beliefs, findings, and instincts. I personally think this film makes more sense, but again, I'm not an expert on the subject, so I can't say for sure who is telling the factual truth. Hell, each side might be telling what they believe is the truth. Who knows? Again, no one.
The one main point that makes me tend to agree with this film is the fact that they contend the Sun is the main cause for global warming. Yeah, "No duh!" is the same thing I said. That makes absolute sense to me, I mean, the sun is the main source of heat in our galaxy, so that's what I tend to believe. Not to mention I know that the climate of our planet has fluctuated for millions of years, long before we were ever alive, it is said that the dinosaurs lived in a very warm, tropical planet, and of course we all know there have been numerous ice ages. So it makes sense to me that this era of Global Warming is yet another of these fluctuations. Still, people are arguing about it everywhere, it's all about who is right, and who is wrong, whose facts you should believe, and whose facts are garbage.
To me, it doesn't really matter. This film was logical in my mind, with the argument that long after humans are gone, the Earth will still survive, and it will go through many more patterns of extreme hot and extreme cold, before and after we are gone. Really, what I learned from this documentary is there is no real thing man can do to change it, except in a vain attempt to save its own ass. This is something that humans obviously aren't worthy of, if the only thing we're capable of is arguing with each other continually.
Well, I'm into that, and this documentary does the job for me, it presents a scenario, and gets me thinking about it, researching it, and talking about it. To me, that's the making of an effective documentary, much like No End In Sight. How do I know if Donald Rumsfeld was lying? I don't. Maybe the people in that documentary were lying too. The thing is, I've seen Rumsfeld say "I don't do quagmires", making a coy reference to a remark Dick Cheney made years ago, but now that Rumsfeld has resigned, and we are still in Iraq, I see that as a quagmire. So maybe No End In Sight doesn't have all its facts either, but I still tend to believe it, based on my personal experiences throughout the time of the war. As it stands right now, I feel like Al Gore made an incomplete, maybe not malicious, but still incomplete movie. Again, this is why movies are made to entertain, not shape our politics and scientific beliefs. The moment they start to do that is the moment they become nothing more than glorified propaganda. And that is becoming eerily close to being a Nazi. No thanks.
9.1/10
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