An Incovenient Truth - Film Review

Global catastrophes have pummeled Earth and its inhabitants more so recently than in other times as recalled by our collective memory, opening vast opportunities for the cinematic community to chip in with its different takes on the issue.

Consequently, nature and ecology-related releases previously relegated to home video and/or television media have been finding their way increasingly onto commercial exhibitors of mainstream motion pictures. 

It wasn’t too long ago we beheld March of the Penguins (also known as Emperor’s Journey), a nature flick packing potent emotional relevance for human viewers, and now here comes what essentially amounts to a traditional documentary-cum-travelogue, or a variety of product previously undesired by theaters busying themselves with money-making blockbusters.

However, a sensitized audience ever more concerned with gas prices and worldwide climatic transformation has made it possible to place An Inconvenient Truth alongside The Da Vinci Code and M:I:3. The result is thought provoking as intended, but not the unbiased triumph we would have hoped for, since its creators’ agenda does creep into proceedings more than the bare minimum mandates.

Director David Guggenheim does well, having cut his teeth on a host of high-caliber TV projects like Party of Five, Alias and Deadwood. He helms a 100 minute-long look at former US vice-president Al Gore’s world-hugging travels in promotion of CO2 emission reduction, a bid described by Gore himself as desperate and one set against a ticking time bomb embodied by rising sea levels and temperatures.

We follow Gore from locale to locale as he eloquently demonstrates the dangers faced by humanity, using some animation and lots of low-key, subtle exposure of various landscapes. Gore is seen visiting China, for example, and his ancestral farm, where he grew up learning first hand about tobacco as an economic engine and health hazard.