Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Review on “The Inconvenient Truth”


The world is but a stage. But if the stage is ruined, what will happen to the actors? This is what I was contemplating after watching the documentary film entitled "The Inconvenient Truth" three times.

What really drives me into watching the film is the comic presentation on global warming by the characters from the Simpsons cartoon. It’s funny, highly entertaining, and even though it doesn’t present the heavily scientific part; it gets into the moral issue quite in a very good way. I mean, not all of us are really interested about the hard facts, I’m not even sure if I understand half of the facts in the movie, but I really got the main issue here. That the world is changing, and it is not really for the better, as we always want it to be. Sometimes, modernization doesn’t really mean a good thing, especially if we ignore the fact that we really heavily on Mother Earth for our existence, and through modernization, we are harming and rapidly destroying our own existence. Al Gore is right. This isn’t a political issue. It is a moral one. And it might also be a social one.

Humanity has for a long time ignored what might be bad for our existence, for the sake of having a more efficient way of living. Development through modernization. Well, that’s how the developed countries reached their developed status, right?

Now, the film shows what we are really missing, which is the real issue for today. If I remember it correctly, someone told me that the main issue we must face isn’t really terrorism, but the threat to our own existence—global warming. And rightly so.

Al Gore said something like, “There might come a time that our next generations would ask, ‘Why hadn’t our earlier generations thought of this problem before? Why hadn’t they awakened earlier?’”. Now this is really more of a social issue. If we won’t do something now, until when might humanity survive? Are we creating our own hell in this little planet?

The documentary actually presented the issue in a unique way. Most of the scenes are presented in a reporting style, I think it must have been presented with a program like that of MSPowerpoint, and inserted with some scenes which further advanced the assertions of Gore. The report presentation is a good idea, so that the scientific details can be included. If it had been presented in a way as that of a common documentary, the hard data would be abandoned and useless, and it would be impossible to present them that way, because most of the hard data used by Gore are graphical. Without those data, it would seem that Gore’s documentary is just an outburst of his loss in the political arena, and not a very big issue that humanity must face. I actually watched the making of the film, and I saw that lots of preparations are made to perfect it. Of course, seeing that they would only have one take to do it all, excluding the inserted scenes.

The film seems to be a protest to the humanity, Mother Earth calling for help. As of the present, I am actually hooked with an online social/architectural game in the computer called My Minilife, and there, it seems that I wasn’t the only one who was made aware of the big issue. When I launched my creation I entitled “Mother Earth’s Cry for Help”, just after I saw the movie the second time in HBO. I was glad to see comments stating that they are also concerned with the global warming issue. I had that faintest idea that they too were able to watch the film documentary, although I didn’t ask them for confirmation on this little deduction of mine. I was pleased that not everyone is apathetic about the issue.

Gore’s movie calls for everyone to participate in helping Mother Earth recover its grandeur once again. I guess, with all the fuss that everyone’s helping, it goes back to the sincerity we exert with the effort. Or else, we won’t be able to solve the issue, or to sustain it, once it is (if it will be) solved.
*****
I've written this for one of my subjects when I was in my first semester as a senior. Just gotta share this with you all...

No comments: