Film Review: The Age of Stupid

I’m sorry, I’m going to gush: this film is a fantastic achievement.

In a remote Artic library, in a climate-ruined 2055, an archivist (Pete Postlethwaite) sits down amid the collected remnants of civilisation to create a memoir using footage from the ‘past’ 50 years. This framework allows director Armstrong (of McLibel fame) to tell six different, bang-up-to-date climate change stories – including that of an oil worker whose home was decimated in Hurricane Katrina; that of Jeh, founder of India’s low-cost airline, and that of Piers, a wind-farmer developer trying to live sustainably.

Interspersed with animated sequences detailing everything from consumerism to the Iraq war, the film builds a picture of climate change that simply couldn’t be told through any other medium. In some inspired footage, the director allows anti-windfarm campaigners to explain why they object to a new development, shortly before their town is flooded in last year’s unseasonal summer weather.

Sure it’s not absolutely perfect: Postlewaite’s dialogue is a little overwrought and his dystopian setting over-egged, but hell – Al Gore won an Oscar for interspersing a slide show with shots of himself in a plane with a laptop. This film knocks spots off An Inconvenient Truth and well deserves the cinema release its crew are hoping for.

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