It's Hard Not To Get Heated Up Over Environmental Dangers Thanks To An Inconvenient Truth

It's always fascinating to go back and watch movies made in a specific political climate and see if they both hold up as movies and examine them as artifacts of the era in which they were made. When I watched Sidney Lumet's Network for the first time last month, that was the exact experience I went through as the film very much served as an encapsulation of 1970's politics while also resonating on its own timeless merits. In the first decade of the 21st century, plenty of pieces of pop culture emerged critical of the George W. Bush administration, one of which was Al Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a film that does make reference to real world political events occurring in the W. Bush era, but is mostly concentrated on the timeless horrors of global warming.


For An Inconvenient Truth, the structure of the movie is a simple one, as the vast majority of the film is comprised of footage of Al Gore giving an extended speech with heavy visual accompaniment, on the dangers of global warming and how it'll affect our planet and ourselves. His speech is regularly backed up by both assortments of scientific data and personal tales relating to his own experiences with individuals that are experts in the fields being greatly affected by the horrors of global warming. All corners of the world and how it's impacted by global warming are looked at in his extended speech.

During the movie, An Inconvenient Truth also takes time to delve into brief segments that examine Al Gore's personal life, most notably his loss in the 2000 presidential election, his thoughts on giving this presentation so many times across the globe and his Tobacco Farmer parents reaction to the Surgeons General warning in 1964. That last anecdote that examines how the public's inability to grasp the idea of cigarettes being dangerous is parallel to the public's current inability to grasp the idea of global warming being an actual thing is the most interesting of these asides since it helps lend both an extra personal angle to Gore's fixation on global warming and adds some historical precedence to Gore's plight of raising awareness of global warming.

The rest of these asides aren't as interesting though, they honestly come off as (accurately or not) producer-mandated sequences designed to ensure that audiences wouldn't be bored staying in one location for the entirety of the movie. They just don't add up to much in the grand total of the film and they distract from the surprisingly strong core of the entire motion picture; Al Gore speaking to an audience and the viewer about the dangers of global warming. Though you'd think an extensive lecture on scientific minutiae may get weary after all (or at least that might be the case for me since I was always more of an English/History kid than a Science whiz), Gore does a fine job keeping things moving and interesting.

Al Gore comes across as a guy whose readily prepared and passionate about this particular topic and his enthusiasm for helping protect our planet can't help but infect the viewer. Letting just the cameras roll as Gore examines what certain temperature-related trends mean without a heavy dose of accompanying wacky graphics or anything of that nature turns out to be a great move since Gore gets across the severity of the situation plenty well on his own, with some stark before/after imagery that really hits home just how devastating global warming has been on fixtures of our planet that were thought to be permanent.

While many political-oriented pieces of entertainment may lose their impact or be diluted when viewed from afar, such moments in An Inconvenient Truth that demonstrate how bleak things look environmentally in 2006 only feel even more somber in 2017 considering just how profoundly worse things have gotten in terms of both global warming's impact on the environment and how much people in power ignore it. Even with some deviations in its presentation that feel a hindrance, An Inconvenient Truth still registers, eleven years later, as a powerful piece of documentary filmmaking all about our planet and a guy who wants to help make a difference on it.