Director: Davis Guggenheim
Category: I
It's hard to fault An Inconvenient Truth. Building on former US vice-president Al Gore's touring presentation about global warming, Davis Guggenheim conveys clearly the basic tenets of Gore's views about mankind's spiralling erosion of the environment, 'a collision of our civilisation and the Earth'.
With its emphasis on the politics and the economics that belie climate change (the infamous incident in which a Bush adviser altered climate reports about greenhouse gas emissions, for example), the film peels away the spin the American Right has used for years to discredit critics of America's environmental policy.
Interspersing the brisk yet well-researched observations and stunning graphics with catastrophic images - the collapse of Antarctic ice-sheets and the chaos wrought by Hurricane Katrina, among others - An Inconvenient Truth brings home Gore's points about the state of the Earth.
Lively and animated, Gore has left behind the stilted persona that lost him the White House six years ago. What makes the presentation a truly engaging experience is his new-found humour, which now allows him to dispense apparently solemn facts with ease and style. The decision to pepper the film with snatches of Gore's assertion of his life's work, however, takes the mythologising a bit too far: he may have been one of the rare ilk of American politicians who championed the green cause when it was still highly unfashionable (as shown in footage of him at work at congressional hearings), but he surely didn't preside over a major drift in US environmental policy during his eight years as the second most powerful man on Earth.
