The film offers many profound points made that need to be perceived by a wider audience, yet the film is badly tainted - and its revolutionary credentials essentially revoked - by the omission of the role of animal exploitation, enslavement and consumption in the degradation of our planetary systems. Indeed, not only is this crucial dysfunction not specifically pointed out, the issue is glossed over, even glorified in the scene with the bucolic cowboys herding their "happy cows" on a pristine prairie. What utter disinformation! The film calls upon us all to become environmentalists... yet you simply cannot be a good environmentalist and continue to fully buy into the corporate/industrial, animal-based food conspiracy! The truth is animal factory farming is the No. 1 cause of rainforest, habitat and species loss, the No. 1 cause of ocean life depletion, the second- leading cause of global warming, high on the causal list of water pollution, water resource depletion, and the perpetuation of human hunger. It is implicated in ALL of the most serious health threats, including cancers, heart disease, diabetes and obesity. It is the most inefficient, most unhealthy (for us and the planet) and most unsustainable way of feeding ourselves. Far worse, it is a system of utter non-virtue and violence that our very cultures are based upon. We enthusiastically imbibe in this evil three times a day, and it goes directly into our bodies and souls! If we are to realize the vision of the producers and voices of Planetary, then this crass dysfunction should be right along side the prodigious use of fossil fuels as targets of elimination, Unlike weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, however, turning away from the holocaust of animal enslavement, exploitation and murder may actually help us to become more peaceful, more compassionate, more actualized Homo sapiens in the process. Radical revolutionaries? That's a laugh, as long as you are you are mindlessly enslaved to the conformity and "tradition" of meat and dairy eating. The film is also very slight on actual solutions. Meditation? Please! If you are meditating three times a day and still eating animals, you remain spiritually shallow and possibly doing absolutely nothing to effect change in the world. You're not bonded to the All and the One, you're bonded to your taste-buds. To change the world, we don't just sit down and meditate, we take action! And the one action that is the most revolutionary, the most radical and the most effective at truly changing the individual and the collective is to cease harming animals! NOW! Alas, I'd like to recommend the film, but simply cannot as long as it contains this absurd flaw.
