A follow-up to the 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is a profound environmental documentary that resonates particularly well now with the current politically divisive debate over global climate change policy. Like the original, it follows former Vice President Al Gore as he sounds the alarm on the increasingly dire effects of global warming largely caused by industrial and energy production pollution. The cameras film Gore as he travels the world giving his famous slideshow about global warming to various climate leadership forums. He also refutes his critics, who say he is exaggerating what’s happening to the Earth, by outlining empirical evidence and actually traveling to Greenland to show the rapidly melting glaciers. In an especially provocative scene, his claim in the original documentary that the World Trade Center site could be flooded in the near future, a statement many critics laughed off, is unfortunately proven true when Superstorm Sandy in 2012 floods the construction site at the new World Trade Center. Much of the movie revolves around the surprisingly riveting and complicated negotiations of the landmark Paris Climate Accord in 2015. For instance, Gore personally deals with the hesitancy of the Indian government who are still relying on dirty energy sources as a result of financial constraints. Eventually, a record deal, in which 195 countries agreed to help reduce carbon emissions and stabilize global temperatures, was reached in April 2015 in Paris. Since I saw an early screening of the film, it did not include the recent decision of the Trump Administration to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. With huge implications for the United States and the world as a whole, this dramatic development has forced the filmmakers to work on a new version of the documentary by fully re-editing the film’s cautiously optimistic conclusion about global warming. Overall, I found it to be important movie that sheds more light on the serious issues surrounding global warming and makes the new political developments much more worrisome.
KEITH on Reels 