L'Age de la stupidité

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.

Every single economy, developed, developing, underdeveloped, Marxist, socialist, social welfare, mixed or full market depends on growth. Increasing population either through reproduction or immigration is the most destructive thing for the planet. That does mean more carbon, more plastic, more pollutants in general, more pavement, more disease transmission -- you name it.

The single best solution for global warming and stress on the planet in general is well understood: Higher level so education for poor women -- specially in the underdeveloped world. the more educated a woman is the longer she differs first pregnancy and the less kids she has.

This film does not address the core issues at all but is a whining, self righteous preaching to the choir so people spend a few pounds, euros or dollars to see it feel like they did something -- when they did NOTHING. The theater I saw this at in the UK was AIR CONDITIONED

The Age of Stupid is a film about climate change, but it's not An Inconvenient Truth: Part Deux. Whereas the purpose of Al Gore's 2006 box office hit was to shake us from our slumber of self-comforting denial, Stupid is designed to take hold of our heads and smash our faces repeatedly into a table until we get up and do things differently.

It's indicative of how the debate has shifted over the last few years that Stupid does not spend time linking climate change with greenhouse gas emissions. The film states that less than 1% of climate scientists believe that there is any doubt about that link (even if this number rises to 60% when the general public are asked their opinion). The debate is over at long last, so the intention of Stupid is to use human stories to illustrate what a serious pickle our species has got itself into.

Stupid is mostly a documentary following the very different lives of six individuals and families around the world. The subjects include an oil geologist who lived in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, attempting to deal with the devastation of losing everything he owned to a natural disaster that was probably worsened by the burning of oil that he discovered.

Stupid is immaculately produced, carefully involving the audience in the on screen emotions, from sharing the heartbreak of the elderly French mountain guide witnessing a glacier recede, to the frustrated anger of the environmentalist whose wind farm had been blocked by a local NIMBY campaign.

Linking the documentaries together is a series of animated fact files from Passion Pictures (famous for the Gorrilaz) and an innovative fictional subplot starring Pete Postlethwaite. Postlethwaite plays the role of an archivist in 2055, responsible for curating a climate-proof store of human culture, history and scientific discovery, as well as two pickled specimens of every creature on Earth. At this stage, the planet is all-but uninhabitable and the archivist creates the film as a warning for whichever civilisation finally inherits the Earth.

Stupid focuses on the idea that it was our behaviour in the years up to 2015 that caused unstoppable climate change, culminating in the near- extinction of life by the middle of the century. Postelthwaite's character struggles to comprehend quite why we did nothing to stop our own suicide even when we knew that we could.

So is it a good film? Yes, it's bordering on the brilliant. At times it made me laugh, at other times it filled me with tears, and at one point I literally swung my fist in anger at the Daily Mail worshipping, house price obsessed, anti-wind lobbyists. Stupid isn't perfect; I felt that a couple of the documentary subjects distracted from the main issue of climate change by focusing on the evils of Big Oil. However, I would still challenge anyone who sees this film to leave the cinema without a fire in their belly.

Sadly, The Age of Stupid has not been seen by many people. It is an independent film which was funded entirely by small contributions from public investors. As such, it hasn't had the benefit of large distribution networks and, three weeks after release, is only now available at a few commendable cinemas. I shared the experience with 13 other people at the Panton St Odeon in London. Elsewhere, Horne and Corden's Lesbian Vampire Killers was probably playing to a full house. The Age of Stupid sounds like quite an apt title to me.

On the surface, Franny Armstrong's 'The Age of Stupid' may seem like just another 'save the planet' type documentary that follows Al Gore's now overrated 'An Inconvenient Truth' but it does make some relevant points particularly on how this effects the developing countries and the common citizen of developed countries (in this day of consumerism when too much is changing too fast). Armstrong takes a look at how some cultures are affected using individual examples. For example, there's the aspiring doctor Layefa Malemi who lives in a poverty stricken region where even clean water is a scarcity and then there's the businessman Jeh Wadia who's working hard to launch his airline company to provide the 'ordinary citizen' with the option to commute through flight. I wonder how affordable the price is made for the ordinary working population. In addition, through an Iraqi family Armstrong also looks at how war, in addition to causing human loss can cause severe environmental damage that may lead to chronic difficulties. At the same time the writer also attempts to show us the other perspective as is the case of Indian businessman Jeh Wadia who appears to start a new airline company to facilitate travelling for the working class citizen (even though the point is made that planes cause severe pollution). On the technical front, it's well shot and edited. The special effects are quite decent and with the legendary Pete Posthlewaite little can go wrong.

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.