The Age of Stupid

The film contrasts a bleak future that we are heading towards with the current way people carry on as usual. The archivist (Pete Postlethwaite) looks after the best of the planets museum exhibits, and looks back from the year 2055 at how we got there. He observes a group in Bedfordshire stopping a potential wind farm from getting through planning, an entrepreneur in India starting a low cost airline, a woman surviving in Nigeria torn by Shell's oil extraction, children exiled from Iraq and a man retired from the oil industry living in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. The scenarios show how complicated it can be to make a difference, but that its something we need, and must, do.

Shell pays a PR company to paint them well.

This is a group of social media hacks making money and selling their wares. If you don't believe look at the reviews. Most good reviews have many likes and come from fake accounts.

This is a piece of junk. Like Zeitgeist, The Age of Stupid is a big work of montage to serve a religion in the hope of getting paid for preaching. It caters to a sectarian movement. Like the Christian or Muslim sects, the eco crowd I know prefers putting others through slavery and hunger, never themselves.

So save your time and money and get a book from somebody who knows there is a climate change and not from some social media informed believes.

Contact me with Questions, Comments or Suggestions ryitfork @ bitmail.ch

The Age Of Stupid has just opened on 78 screens across the UK - a remarkable feat for a genre-defying independent feature made on a shoe string, funded by ordinary households and distributed with a launch budget of just £130,000. To put this in perspective, An Inconvenient Truth opened in 2006 on just 18 screens and a typical UK-wide release spends around £650,000 telling people to go and see their film.

So why all the fuss?

Four years ago McLibel director Fanny Amstrong and producer Lizzie Gillett set about making a documentary called (at the time) Crude, which charted the ugly side of the oil industry. Fast forward to 2009 and the project has finally emerged as a surprisingly human and touching call-to-arms about climate change called Age Of Stupid.

The film opens in 2055 with Pete Postlethwaite, archivist of a ruined earth, looking back at images of the present day, trying to answer the question of why humanity didn't save itself when it had the chance. Archival news material and animated sequences are used to provide background and context, but the focus is on documentary stories of real people facing the effects of our hunger for fossil fuels.

As a result, the film does not labour under the burden of attempting to sway the undecided through facts and figures - though it's possible that even Sarah Palin herself could not fail to be affected by the story of Fernand Pareau, an octogenarian French mountain guide, showing us the glacier he loves as it withers away before his eyes.

As we explore the ageing archivist's question, we encounter "not in my back yard" anti-wind farm protesters, committed climate change activists and an entrepreneur who dreams of ending poverty by starting India's third budget airline. Blame is ultimately laid at the feet of our culture of consumerism, and the implication is that profound social changes will be required to survive the present age - poignantly exemplified in a sequence involving Alvin DuVernay, a hurricane Katrina survivor who, having lost all of his possessions, philosophically reflects on what it took for him to realise what was actually important to him.

At the time of writing, around half of the IMDb votes have given the film a rating of 9 or 10 and around a quarter have given it rating of 1. This polarisation is not about artistic merit, but between those for whom the film has deeply resonated and those who find it confronting and uncomfortable.

I've read some complaints about the film being preachy, and it is certainly true that there is forceful criticism of – say – Shell's operations in the Niger delta and the Iraq war. There is no attempt to present any positive outcome of these interventions, but then I'm not expecting a rush of filmmakers wanting to fill this particular gap in the market.

In general the voices of dissent come from the mouths of those directly affected, and indeed it is the human face of these stories that is one of the film's engaging strengths. History's witness is not always the great orator we want it to be, but over 90 minutes the film manages to maintain a good pace and link the various threads together.

The Age Of Stupid has dispensed with convention in a multitude of ways, not the least of which is the way it has forced its way onto our screens, seemingly through sheer force of will alone. Ultimately the merit of the film is not about the quality of editing or its performances, but its transformational potential. I genuinely think that many viewers will leave the cinema and, like Alvin DuVernay, start to question the world which surrounds them, and it is this quality which makes The Age Of Stupid a truly remarkable film.

As a scientist (biochemist) almost every day I feel deep pain in my heart when the news shows frustrating human impact on the nature. Maybe 10 years pass since I joined Greenpeace site, but political instability in my country (Serbia) didn't let me to join the Greenpeace world protests, but I plan to participate in the future. The plot of this movie is more than realistic, all scientific evidences predicts very black future if global emission of greenhouse gases doesn't rapidly decrease until 2015. So, plotted 2055. tower whit the Archivist wouldn't be SF... The film have strong green message, and I am 100% sure that I'll watch again and recommend the film to my friends.

The subject of climate change is often covered but rarely brought to the big screen. This ambitious low budget project is well worth viewing because it will make you think just that little more about how we're draining resources on earth.

It's a neat idea. The late and much missed Pete Postlethwaite is an archivist who spends the entire film touching a computer screen showing us reasons why the planet ended up in such a desolate state in 2055.

Interlaced with six separate documentary stories covering various aspects of climate change are snippets of news recordings, social commentary and animation hybrid. It all works rather well, your interest is kept high and the stories all work the grey matter into overdrive. All held together by Postlethwaite who in reality has very little to do but does it rather well nonetheless.

Most certainly worth a watch and just may well tempt you to try reduce your carbon emission. A good effort all round.