Brave Blue World

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.

I recently watched this documentary with my family and kids over the weekend. I was eager to see what Matt Damon had to say about water!! All of my family enjoyed the film and learned something new including my 8 and 9 year old kids who have just informed me they would like to work in water!

The solutions presented were the right mix of science and story and the film really broke down some of the challenges in the water industry.

I hope there will be a Brave Blue part 2 or a series where they will go more into detail about each of the different areas within this complex industry.

(Beth's story was without doubt my favourite!)

The film is ok. The technologies shown are interesting and inspire some hope in the survival of the humanity, but the simplest and maybe the most important solution was not even mentioned. Ok, home filters of the "grey" water waste can save several thousand liters of water per month, but let's have a look at another example. The production cycle of just one liter of milk requires around a thousand liters of water; one burger patty requires several thousands liters. Just by switching to an oat or soy milk and ditching beef (and preferably all the meat) you will save enormous amounts of water, hundreds of thousands liters per year just in your household. We need to think globally. Water is used not only in our taps, but for all the products which we buy and we eat.

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.

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.