SFIFF 52: 'The Age of Stupid'

At last somebody has thought to bring all the emotional impact of narrative filmmaking to the ever-more pressing issue of climate change in a movie we can't pass off as sensational entertainment. British director Franny Armstrong's third film 'The Age of Stupid' is an ingenious combination of both documentary and fictional narrative; the latter element brings a soaring sense of urgency to a subject frankly in need of it. As Armstrong herself pointed out in the Q and A, we have only seven months in which to organize our respective nations' political commitment to reduce carbon emissions at Copenhagen in December. Copenhagen will be, she assures us, our last chance to establish some ground rules in a rapidly deteriorating environment approaching its tipping point, according to current science, in 2015. Billed as the new Kyoto, Copenhagen's basic tenets involve a commitment on the part of the developed world to reduce emissions immediately, while developing nations will be allowed to increase theirs (to accomodate political reality), until we arrive at an equal playing-field by 2015. At this point we will all work to reduce emissions until they are at a few degrees higher than pre-industrial levels, projected to complete in the year 2055. Anything less than this spells disaster for our planet. There really is no sci-fi fantasy than can match the urgency of this scenario, and yet we are behaving as though everything will come out in the wash, trusting to future generations to fix our problems while we applaud ourselves for recycling our papers and cans and sigh about our impotence to effect real change. On the contrary, says Armstrong, we are the generation that must and will bring about the change we need, because that change has to take place immediately if we are to avert the disaster scenario she conjures in her film.

The opening sequence of supernova followed by stellar formation, creation of planets and atmospheres, cell-division, the appearance of underwater lifeforms, their transition to land, the development of mammals, man and society right through war, technology, and the demographic, geologic, and climatic disasters that await us if we fail to act, set to the maniacally spinning digital clock of our known universe's lifespan, is so breathtaking I actually cried. The implication is right there, between the eyes, from the very start - what a waste, what a horrible, perverted lack of vision in our species it implies if we continue to do as we are doing and throw it all away. Apropos of this, Armstrong mentioned in an aside the subject of her university thesis - whether or not the human race is suicidal. It's an interesting proposition, which touches on what I consider to be our fundamental lack of love for our own species, but that is another story.

The film is set in 2055. Mankind has failed to act and the apocalyptic scenario has come to pass; an archive of all human achievement has been assembled in a gargantuan tower which hovers somewhere above the north pole. Ironically, this is exactly the sort of thing I can envisage us wasting our time on when things start to come apart, a project which is essentially a hymn to the human ego, a lovely, meaningless elegy. Pete Postlethwaite, the 'Archivist', riffles through a selection of news clips and documentary evidence in an attempt to understand why we failed to act. Enter the real-life documentary talents of Armstrong and company, who supply us with verite footage shot over the past few years; films about people whose lives are, in one way or another, connected to one of our principal protagonists in this massive drama, the oil industry. Not that there aren't other culprits - the meat industry and agricultural lobby, for example, but Armstrong seeks to keep the narrative frame as tight as possible. We are introduced to a family of refugees from the Iraq war, villagers living with the impact of a nearby Shell plant in Nigeria, an American oil company retiree, an airline entrepreneur from India, an elderly French mountain-guide who treks the shrinking Alpine glacier and organizes against the Euro transport lobby, and a struggling English wind-farm engineer as he tries, and fails, to confront the vacuous opposition of British county-types defending their 'view'. The stories are edited together with news clips we will recognize from our world media, scenes of Katrina and other disasters, scientific reports and episodes of morning show hand-wringing, the recorded efforts of our contemporaries which seem so fatuous and absurd in the light of what has taken place. The film is a wake-up call along the lines of 'An Inconvenient Truth', but hopefully its emotional power will succeed, where that film failed, in stirring the kind of passion for our planet we are going to need to get us through this unprecedented moment. Perhaps this is the eye of the needle we all heard about a long time ago and didn't really comprehend. Contact http://www.notstupid.org/ for information about what you can do in the next seven months. See film trailer here.