Entertainment: An Inconvenient Truth

**** - This is one of the few must see movies that are truly must see. Not must see in the sense that it's terrifically entertaining (although in many ways it is), but in the sense that you must see it like you must see the car coming down the street before you cross it. It's imperitive.

In An Inconvenient Truth we discover a much more human Al Gore than we saw back in 2000, not at all a stiff as a board stuffed shirt. Gore is engaging, passionate, and surprisingly funny. He is on a quest, a quest to wake the world up to the growing problem of global warming, and by the end of the film it's hard not to understand his drive to get the message out. Near the end of the film Gore spells out exactly why this movie works. He's spent the last several years giving this lecture, watching his audiences and cataloging the reasons people resist or marginalize the thought of global warming. He then finds ways to get around this opposition, and he's gotten very good at it. I myself believed in global warming, but I had doubts about how much we were or were not causing it. Maybe this was cyclical (before we humans ever set foot on this planet the normal weather swings gave us New York under glaciers at one extreme to 70 degree weather in Antartica), maybe we had little effect, maybe we had more effect than we thought. I wasn't sure of the context, and I didn't think scientists were either. But with compelling evidence that Gore presents with the grace of that school teacher you knew who could teach anything to anyone, there is a context, and it's a frightening one.

Mostly this movie is a Power Point presentation, albiet one on steriods. It's not nearly as boring as it sounds, it's engaging. Maybe Gore thought we would be bored with the lecture he's given nearly a thousand times because intercut throughout the movie are documentary style clips of Gore preparing his lesson and a history as to how he came to know his subject so intimately. He gives us some life stories, how his son was nearly killed when younger, how his sister died of lung cancer, his failed bid for presidency, which aren't really necessary but do give a richness to the story he is trying to tell. Gore is also surprisingly good at the voice over narrations he does during these parts.

This is an important movie that should be viewed by as many people as possible. There is a lot of evidence for global warming that is presented here that is not yet being disseminated by the mainstream media. Gore's dissertation is well thought out and thorough. He does not come off as preachy or aloof, he is earnest and even contrite for not having done more sooner. From shocking pictures of glacier melting already well in progress to statistical analysis (consider that carbon dioxide levels are already twice as high as they've been in the last several thousand years) Gore builds an undeniably compelling case.

This movie should appeal to anyone.