The Age of Stupid Editorial Review

The Age Of Stupid began life as writer-director Franny Armstrong's attempt to document the oil trade by following the interlocking-story template popularised by Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. But her provocative project was rethought as a climate-change docudrama, adding Pete Postlethwaite as an old man in a ravaged 2055 looking back over his archives, jabbing at a touchscreen and asking, "Why didn't we do something about this when we had the chance?"

The shift in style and approach is something of a shame, because the Postlethwaite scenes jar and interrupt the most interesting bits: a Nigerian woman's life devastated by Shell; a wind-turbine salesman battling sniffy English toffs who can't see past their own backyard to the greater needs on the immediate horizon; a Katrina survivor and his gradual awakening.

The aim of The Age Of Stupid to scare us into activism, which would have been better done if Armstrong had trusted her instincts and left out the sci-fi.