Review by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
The Age Of Stupid
launched on DVD in the UK on October 19, 2009
Price: £19.99
Certificate: 12A
Running time: 90 minutes
How can we have been that stupid and still be that stupid to let the stuff happening while we may have a chance to change things. But most carry on as if nothing was happening. But, serious things are happening and we must act before it is too late. Scary!
“The Age Of Stupid” has been touted to be the hardest hitting climate change film documentary to have hit the cinema screens and it certainly is so, in my view. Now you can also own this hard hitting film on DVD from October 19, 2009. Definitely worth getting a copy and sharing your findings with those around you.
Directed by Franny Armstrong (McLibel, Drowned Out) and produced by Oscar-winning producer John Battsek (One Day in September, In the Shadow of the Moon) this film, as far as I am concerned, could, nay should, be in line for some of the awards that are out there, such as the Oscars.
Pete Postlethwaite stars as the narrator of the film, an old man living alone in what is a devastated world of 2055, which London being submerged to a great degree, looking at “archive footage” from 2008, asking “why did we not stop climate change when we had the chance?”
Pete's character is the founder of the Global archive, a storage facility located in the (now melted) Arctic, dedicated to preserving all of humanity's achievements in the hope that the Planet might one day be habitable again.
The stories that Pete's character – he does not give us his name – uses to illustrate the plight of Planet Earth when something could have been done, an easily to a degree, include those of six individuals across the globe, whose lives have been affected in some way by climate change.
The melting alpine glaciers described by the French mountain guide are a scary thing for sure, and should make us all realize that the Planet has gotten warmer, and considerably at that. But this is not just due to the carbon emissions but equally if not more so due to the fact that we have been destroying tree cover at a rate of knots ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and are still doing so.
Produced independently, using the unique methods of film financing through a “crowd funded” budget, The Age Of Stupid is a film that hands the audience a very stark dose of reality, forcing us to comprehend the true enormity of scale of what we are doing to the Earth.
We must do our utmost to reverse the trend and get CO2 back to sustainable levels and, as far as I can see, trees are some of he best ways of doing that.
A very sobering part of the story is where the planning appeal for a wind farm is being lost in the British countryside because of the NIMBY attitude and for all the wrong reasons.
The people come up with the “the turbines spoil the view” and such claptrap which still claiming to be concerned about climate change and the state of the Planet.
Britain is ideally placed for wind energy but also appears to have the greatest number of NIMBYs in all of Europe when it comes too such installations.
If climate change were Fascism we would do something about it. We went to war against Nazi Germany's Fascism because of the treat it posed to the world. Climate change is posing a threat far greater than that and we must treat it as such a dangerous threat and declare a war footing, worldwide.
This film should bring the message through to the people but what worries me is that it is going to be one, despite the fact that it is in mainstream cinemas, that will be watched mostly by the converted.
My rating of this movie would be a 11 out of 10, if one could rate that way, and I am sure the reader will get the idea of what I am trying to say here with that.
© 2009
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