Sunday, March 25, 2007

Review: An Inconvenient Truth

Beth and I finally saw An Inconvenient Truth last night. This much talked about documentary has raised awareness about the climate change that is occuring due to global warming. Of course, it's not without controversy and the movie tries to address the skeptics as much as possible. I don't consider myself an expert on both sides of the issue. My view on global warming is that whether or not this is happening, the changes that are being suggested are just good for the environment in general.

As for the movie, I enjoyed the film and thought that it got its point across very well. I would have liked to have seen a lot less focus on Al Gore and his past because I don't think it added anything to the film. Also, the visuals, which added a lot to the message, were tough to view sometimes. For example, the labels on the axes on some of the graphs were difficult to read which meant that the scales of some of the graphs were difficult to read. Scales on graphs can be manipulated to make changes in data look more extreme and I wanted to be sure that this wasn't happening. My biggest complaint, though, is that Al Gore does not know how to say "ARCTIC." He continually said "Artic" and "Antartic" which, to me, hurt his credibility. Couldn't someone tell him how to say it?

Even with these flaws, the movie is required viewing for everyone.

5 comments:

Larry said...

I haven't seen this yet, but I agree that we should make some changes regardless of whether or not it's actually causing global warming.-Does it talk much of overpopulation.-Isn't that the root cause of most of our envirometal problems?

Patrick B. said...

Larry,

Yep, they definitely talk about population. Specifically, they mention the increase from 2 billion to 6.5 billion people in the last 50 years. It's definitely the root cause of the problem and everything just cascades from there.

Anonymous said...

Huh -- we also finally saw it Saturday night. Sort of preaching to the choir in our case but I went to bed depressed all over again.

MojoMan said...

I just ordered it from Netflix and will watch it soon. Thanks for the heads-up on things to watch for.

What? You don't think we should have NUCULAR plants in the ARTIC? Bad pronunciation can certainly make leaders look silly.

Anonymous said...

I thought the movie brought a lot of awareness to environmental problems but that was about it.
Awareness is only part of the equation to solving problems. Gore spent more time trying to make himself look good than actually coming up with good, solid solutions and acting on them. I don't need a bitter, wanna-be president preaching from his private jet about how I should use less fuel.