End of the world as we know it?

AGE OF STUPID
Directed by Fanny Armstrong
Certificate 12a

FRANKLY, it’s not looking good for us lot here on planet Earth.
And quite how bad it is forms the basic premise of this docu-drama by the makers of the super McLibel.
Director Franny Armstrong and producer Lizzie Gillet trawled the world for six stories that set out in cold, hard terms the fact Earth is heading towards destruction.
While disaster movies usually have a chiselled hero ready to step in at the end and save the day, Armstrong instead asks the audience to do the job – we’re told as the final credits roll up that we need to get off our backsides and get our elected representatives to stop mucking about and bring in radical policies to combat global warming.
There have been a series of eco-films in the past few years charting the end of the age of oil. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is perhaps the best known, but other general release movies include the story of the Garbage Warrior, the architect Michael Reynolds who has built villages out of rubbish in New Mexico and Asia that are completely self-sufficient for their energy and waste disposal.
But none really portrays the stark message quite so clearly, quite so well, as Armstrong and her team. The challenge facing her is the complexity of the issue she has bitten off. It must have been tempting to bombard the viewer with the twin turn-offs of worthy statistics to hammer home the threat, and some bombastic, Speakers Corner-style soapbox rantings against the inequalities, the inadequacies and the inhumane way we have been living our lives since the dawn of mass production.
We meet Pete Postlethwaite as he pedals a 1970s Chopper bike through a storage facility shaped unintentionally like an airport control tower. He is The Archivist, a survivor of a global climactic breakdown. In his wind and solar-powered edifice he has a Noah’s Ark of clobber, collected during the last days of civilisation, so that someone, something, in the future will be able to chart the rise and rapid descent of human kind.
While this seems like a premise for an Armageddon-style movie, we quickly flip from fiction to fact. Armstrong’s stories link together to paint a terrifying picture of where we are today and what is going to happen tomorrow.
The six tales are all strong and stand on their own.
Alvin Duverney is a New Orleans hero. When Hurricane Katrina struck, he battened down the hatches, got his 84-year-old father indoors, moved his guitar and records to the top shelves of his sitting room and waited for the storm to come. As things got hairy, he got handy and went round his flooded neighbourhood in an inflatable boat, rescuing more than100 people who were stranded.
Alvin, who works for Shell oil as a paleontoligist, finds microscopic creatures which are vital clues in the hunt for new oil beds. With Katrina caused by global warming, the paradox is Alvin cursing the weather for ruining his home while he has through his work contributed to the baddie of the piece.
Jeh Wadia from Mumbai is an entrepreneur who wants to establish the country’s first cheap airline, while Layef Malemi lives in Nigeria in a poverty-stricken village while Shell pumps millions of dollars of oil out from under their feet every day.
Other key characters illustrate different strands of the argument. We meet a family of Iraqi refugees who are victims of the war for oil, and follow Mont Blanc guide Fernand Pareau as he mourns the fast-shrinking glacier etched down the side of the mountain he has lived his life in the shadow of.
I went with the director and producer to a planning meeting regarding the siting of wind turbines, which makes up the sixth tale, and interviewed those objecting to it afterwards. (I even make a five-second appearance – enough, I am told, to get an IMDB entry!)
The film will scare the life out of you, and, as the film-makers hope, inspire you to consider your own lifestyle and badger your elected representatives to take a lead on tackling the crisis. It is nothing less than a proper tub-thumping call to arms.