Things must be getting serious. At least for the planet and the environment.
What else would explain the plethora of eco documentaries hitting the film festival circuit or that will hit mainstream theaters in the near future?
Many of these green docu films cast a waving finger along with charts and graphs about what will happen to the planet in the future if we don’t act now. The Age of Stupid works a bit in reverse.
The Age of Stupid takes place in the year 2055 with a man called the Archivist (Pete Postlethwaite) sitting in a Noah’s Ark type storage tower with a collection of famous art, pairs of animals, and enough computer servers to make Google envious.
The tower exists because the world has turned into a fiery, and flood ridden disaster area. The Archivist searches through archived video footage to see where man went wrong after having the opportunity to change things. The film takes a futuristic standpoint of looking at the present (like right now).
Instead of following one narrative, director Franny Armstrong takes a Traffic style approach with six different narratives. Instead of the drug trade, this film cleverly looks at the climate change.
Armstrong weaves the film’s central climate change core through various through lines, among others, transportation, war, consumerism, natural disaster, and alt energy and ties them together with intense and striking visuals.
One story follows a local New Orleans hero Alvin DuVernay who rescued about 200 people and animals after hurricane Katrina hit but later we find out that he has worked for Shell for 30 years.
Another narrative highlights Jeh Wadia who launches a discount Indian airline and honestly believes that he’s aiding the poor masses with cheap fares and thinks that the environmental aspect of flying an airline will just work itself out.
The film smoothly displays how each of the characters has their own justification for doing something or their own hypocrisy toward climate change.
Like any multiple story line film, some characters and stories offer more connection, insight, emotion and education than others.
On a creative level, for a low budget film, this pop-style documentary offers high production values with its spirited animation sequences and an often high charged music score. It also offers a clever way of telling the cautionary climate change tale that has been seemingly uttered countless times in recent years.
Armstrong obviously created this film as a two-minute warning leading up to the Copenhagen treaty in December 2009, and although the film isn’t perfect, hopefully she will be able to make a sequel called the Age of Smart.
(Originally published at Sustainablog.org)
About This Story
Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.
That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.
Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.
Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?
Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.
Thank you,
