Brave Blue World

'It never ceases to amaze when the critics come out to play. I just can't figure out why they've zeroed in on a *positive* piece as this. It's astounding. I'd normally ignore yet I know for a fact - human nature dictates - there's hundreds of positive folk for each 'hater' (scientific or bias accuser) up here. Yes, I get that there's DuPont and others. I concur the big players are not playing well. Yet, we collectively must (must!) work towards the good stuff.

As far as I'm aware this is an optimistic look at the options. I commend the makers and I too am biased, I've known of this in the works for years. I am thrilled it's out there and moreover grateful, to cut-through the chat and get the new message to the new scientist who will over time weed out the institutionalized neg-heads. Sorry to sound crass or cruel, I don't mean to. But the gentle whiff of positivity needs to be encouraged and protected. Go make your own documentary and let me know and I'll support you all the way. Meantime, please treat this one as a 'asks the right questions' piece, that let's remember has really make it to the mainstream, as this has! A piece of work to inspire and hopefully to lead by! Congratulations!''

I was shocked by how badly this film was put together. From the way it's edited, to the choice of music (and how it's laid into the film), to the cheesy introduction shots of the contributors, the jump cuts and sound cuts (you literally hear the cuts during Matt Damon's interview), down to the way it's written: not just cheesy commentary, hyperboles, random links trying to stitch scenes together and things which are obviously been written without even looking at the film (There's a hilarious moment where the commentary says "this man is... etc etc..etc... " over the shot of the sky. We only see the "man" in question after a few seconds. That's film-making 101). The most impressive vistas are actually stock shots (I even recognised some from the Shutterstock Library). It is disjointed and confused, cheesy, one-sided and simplistic, but I suppose the core message is probably what counts here (and how they were able to get people like Matt Damon and Liam Neeson), which is also why I'm not giving it 1 star. There are some interesting snippets here and there and however badly the film is made, it does paint a promising picture of how new technologies are helping us to manage, clean and re-use our water. It's a shame that such an important message was only able to get such a bad piece of film-making. Even more astonishing that it currently has 7.3 on imdb.

I am a chemist, engineer, and water resource scientist. While I'm always happy to see a documentary raise awareness of water availability/quality issues, this documentary has a number of issues of its own.

First of all, the so-called 'solutions' being offered by its sprawling list of do-gooder celebrities are not innovative, novel, or sustainable. They're well-proven technologies putting temporary band-aids on deep sociopolitical problems for the sake of making their celebrity sponsors feel good.

Second, the film has a number of corporate sponsors. As a result, it failed to touch on some very real issues with the way we currently treat water. For example, Reverse Osmosis is disgustingly inefficient. It wastes about half the water it treats. It also absolute munches through power, and the waste stream from RO is a concentrated pollutant being shot back into the environment. But Suez, one of the sponsors, is a major player in RO and membrane desalination. So that got glossed over.

Third, it perpetuates the myth of a straight-up bogus technology. Humidity-condensers are not viable products. They've been debunked over and over and over again. The thermodynamics of converting whatever small amount of moisture is in the air to drinking water are enormous. And other than that lone instance of local innovation, the rest of the documentary reeks of western-savior complex.

This documentary is mental candy. Replaces real nutrition, and is bad for your teeth (from all the clenching).

Full of vaporware tech. It was painful to watch. So many contradictions between chapters. The odd chapters was interesting just to see existing industrial complex but mostly awful. And the narrative was just silly. How is this 7+ stars.

A number of these technologies are very interesting and promising, but the notion that they're a panacea, that the technology is all there and all that lacks is political will, investment and societal change is frankly false. The energy intensity of many of these solutions is a key problem that was not covered, whilst the prohibitive cost of installing and maintaining others, particularly in developing countries, was not really mentioned. Furthermore, the biggest anthropogenic uses of water, e.g. for irrigation, provide some of the greatest opportunities to reduce water use, so that using marginal sources to reach the very high levels of purity required for drinking may not be required. But innovations in irrigation which dwarf other savings were hardly mentioned at all. It's great to see this massive issue in the popular mainstream, and I credit the creators with achieving that, but a more thoroughly researched sequel would be helpful in due course.