Review: An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

In early 2007, I posted perhaps my shortest review ever. A single sentence that read, “This is perhaps the scariest movie I have ever seen. Everyone needs to see it. Everyone. That means you Mr. President.”

The pretentiousness of this review does not escape me at the present moment. Who did I think I was directing a comment towards the President? And how could I declare a movie the ‘scariest’ without stating why. “Everyone needs to see it.” Young Max, did you not feel the need to develop that argument, at all?

There are a few explanations here. First of all, I was busy studying abroad in Florence, Italy. That is why my review is in early 2007, not in mid-2026 when the documentary actually came out. Second, this is an admittedly hard movie to analyze. It is so simple and straightforward, that my main description of it would be its obviousness. I'm not sure I could have added all that much in movie-analysis at the time. There is much more to say now because the documentary is about the future, and its merits rises and falls with its predictive ability.

It is a powerpoint slideshow. Al Gore, at that point in his post-2000-election life, had been touring the world giving a lecture on global warming. The documentary filmmaker behind this movie, Davis Guggenheim, took that lecture and filmed it in a movie studio with a live studio audience. In between certain slides, he presents a sort-of interview with Al Gore that is more biography than science report. The movie is half powerpoint science lesson and half Al Gore biography.

Al Gore has a tendency to preempt a particular topic with phrases like “for lots of complicated reasons” and then focus on a simplistic version of the basic science principals he is trying to illustrate. It is especially apparent that this is not a lecture by a scientist directed at other scientists. It is a lecture by a politician directed to the general public. The most important part, the actual cause of global warming, takes only a few minutes to go through and half of that is a cartoon. But the thing is, the cause of global warming, it is kind of simple. Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, trap more heat from the sun than non-greenhouse gases. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped, and the hotter the atmosphere will be.

It is the effects of that basic principle that are complex. And the complexity of those effects themselves pale next to the complexity of the possible solutions to the problem. The movie, perhaps wisely, focuses on the possible effects and barely mentions until the last ten-fifteen minutes any possible solutions.

People remember most of all Al Gore’s adventures on the scissors lift. He presents two line charts covering the last 600,000 years. One is carbon in the atmosphere measured in parts per million or ppm (this data comes from Antarctica ice cores). The second is the overall temperature of the atmosphere, which during this time, included several ice ages. Al Gore points to the most recent ice age and comments that Cleveland, Ohio had a mile of ice over it at the time. Then he gets on his scissors lift to show what scientists believe the ppm will be in 2050 if the trends continue. It will be more than double the highest it has ever been in the last 600,000 years and that doubling occurs in such a minuscule amount of time relative to the size of the chart that the line shoots up, literally off the chart, almost at a vertical angle. If that was the most memorable visual, his next words, are the most memorable quote:

“Now the so-called skeptics look at this say ‘so, that seems perfectly okay’. Well, again, if on the temperature side, if this much on the cold side is a mile of ice over our heads, what would that much on the warm side be?...Ultimately, this is not really a political issue so much as a moral issue. If we allow that to happen, it is deeply unethical.”

The performance of Al Gore, and it is a performance, is at its strongest when he makes this particular point. He pivots quite unexpectedly and suddenly from a kind of joking and “shaking-my-head” at the global warming critics, to a downright serious allegation of immorality directed at everyone. Indeed, the cut is so jarring right before “it is deeply unethical”, that I suspect it might be an entirely different take.

But really understand what Al Gore is saying here. He doesn’t say certain apocalyptic things will happen. (Global Warming, per this documentary at least, is not like an asteroid strike like, say, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up). Al Gore doesn’t know what will happen if CO2 gets to 500 ppm. What he is saying is that, given the difference between an ice age and a not-ice age, we would be worse-than-fools to find out.

Looking back at this movie, it is actually quite notable how little of specific predicting Al Gore does. When he does get specific, he has his own hits and misses. There still is snow on Mount Kilimanjaro, but the other glaciers were receding and still are receding. (Boy, we just got an extremely severe flash flood in Nepal from the melting of a glacier in the Himalayas). Alot of the predictions haven't come to pass, but just haven't happened yet. Antarctica and Greenland haven't entirely melted resulting in 20 feet of ocean level rise, but they are in the process of doing so. Keep in mind, that his timescale is 2050, not 2026.

But overall, this isn't about making exact predictions. He is just presenting scientific bullet points with the inference of their implications. The hotter it is over water, the more water evaporates, the larger the clouds, the larger the storms (Hurricane Katrina?). The hotter it is over land, the more water evaporates, the drier the land, the larger the fires (Sahel starvation?). If sea levels rise, and Bangladesh is at sea level, where will all of its millions of people move to?

The science parts are particularly interesting, so much so that you sometimes wonder why the movie is cutting in so frequently to talk about Al Gore’s life. Some of it is relevant. For instance, he knew the scientists in the 1960s and 1970s that were first starting to measure the Earth’s atmosphere. So, his biography is a good way to present information about the first scientists. Other parts, like his failed 2000s election or his son landing in the emergency room due to an automobile accident, are not so much on point. One would be forgiven, in 2006, for suspecting that this documentary was as much of a political advertisement for Al Gore in some prospective election as it was about global warming. Well, it turns out Al Gore never did run for office again, so a better explanation at this point is that Davis Guggenheim wanted to ground the emotion of the story in character, which is a legitimate artistic choice and frequently occurs in documentaries of all kinds. There is one particular facet of Al Gore’s biography that does seem especially relevant. His family grew tobacco and his eldest sister smoked cigarettes. Then she developed lung cancer and died of it. As a result of a crisis of conscience, he informs us that his family stopped growing tobacco. More than anything, this confession softens Al Gore's view towards the rest of us. His family was mistaken on the science of a particular well-known and controversial issue, but upon new information, they changed their behavior. The taking of this bitter medicine is something Al Gore, in solidarity, demonstrates for the rest of us.

The most telling feature of the documentary though is how utterly lacking the proposed solutions are. (knowing much less about the world 20 years ago, I hardly understood the futility). We were nowhere close to figuring this out in 2006. The end credits tell the audience to recycle and turn off lights in rooms they aren’t using. That’s a joke. On an individual level, there isn’t anything that anyone can do besides virtue signaling. It means absolutely nothing for one particular person to be carbon neutral. This is a world-wide issue that requires a world-wide solution. And the vague outline of a solution only really became apparent and/or believable in the last five years. The complete collapse of the cost of solar power makes it extremely competitive with power based on fossil fuels. The current Iran War will further provoke a switch to solar power (and with it more peace in general. Imagine the knock-on effects of not having to kow-tow to hostile and authoritarian regimes hoarding oil). And once we have more than enough solar power, we will be able to and must start removing carbon from the atmosphere. There is too much of it already, so it simply will not be enough to stop adding more. Limiting carbon emissions without replacing the same with just as cheap or cheaper alternative sources of power was never going to work. In 2006, even though the USA and other Western countries have greater per capita emissions, the growth in emissions of developing economies would naturally eclipse any limitation of carbon the West could ever impose on itself. And you can’t lecture dirt poor countries into not developing their power grids. It is arguable that global warming, even with its most detrimental effects, would be preferable to a third-world country remaining in medieval times. 

But no matter how ungraspable the future effects of the changing climate or the solutions for the same were in 2006, the basic point of Al Gore ultimately prevails. He drives it home with an illustration taken from an early 1990s conference that debated the cost-benefits of doing anything about global warming. The illustration is of a weighing scale with a pyramid of gold bars on one side. Hmm, tasty, muses Gore. On the other side is the planet. How could one possibly be more important than the other? And how could our plan of action be nothing?

And finally, Al Gore presents us with the following thought experiment. What will future generations think about the choices we made once we knew about the implications of global warming? What would they think of the political polarization on the topic best exemplified by the dramatic MAGA growth of Florida in the past twenty years, a development willfully defiant of the most obvious consequences of global warming? As for liberals, how will they be remembered when, at a time of urgency, they were obsessed with deeply unimportant identity politics? What will future generations think indeed.

The Odyssey (5/5 Stars)

There is a primal quality to this most ancient of tales. It speaks to a deep seated fear of the ancient traveler, that these things you have, your wife, your family, your property, your place in the community, can be taken away by usurpers behind your back as soon as you are far enough away to be unable to defend them. What makes men respect the possessions of a man called to war across the sea, where fate and/or chance can delay or prevent his return. Well, there is this most well known and oft-told story of a hero of the Trojan War, one Odysseus, King of Ithaca, who was lost for almost ten years after the Fall of Troy (gone from home home twenty years in total), but did indeed come back, stronger than ever, and with vengeance for all those who sought to take advantage of his absence.

The Odyssey is a long convoluted tale with a lot of different set pieces. I believe it would be exceedingly difficult to parse this ancient material, honor those elements that are famous, and keep a core through-line. Christopher Nolan’s masterful adaptation not only does this, but adds material that enhances and develops his themes, making the movie version of the story, in important ways, superior to the original text. This movie is not only easier to follow, it means more, because it knows better what the story is about than the original text (or it is at least clearer what Nolan wants the story to mean).

Everyone knows the various encounters that disrupt Odysseus’s return home, the island of the cyclops, the sirens, Charbydis and Scylla. In many tellings, these well-known set pieces overwhelm the scenes at home because, in Ithaca, there is no action, just subtle political intrigue. The strength of this movie comes from Nolan’s focus on first establishing the Ithaca subplot, developing it in an important and dramatic scene in the center of the movie (in the Land of the Dead), and then paying those scenes off in the climatic ending.

How Nolan does this is entirely his addition to the story. He adds two characters not in the original text. In the beginning they are teenage boys, subject to the Ithaca draft for the Trojan War. One, Antinious, draws the short straw, but since he is the only son of his family, Odysseus (Matt Damon) allows another boy, Sinon, to take his place. Antinious promises to Sinon to take care of his family while he is gone.

At the end of the Trojan War, Antinious (Robert Pattinson), we learn, has broken his vow to Sinon and not taken care of his family. Indeed, we find him squatting with a bunch of other suitors in the home of Odysseus, putting pressure on his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) to choose another husband. The situation is fraught with danger. Penelope intuits, I think correctly, that any man she chooses to be her husband would eventually see her son (Tom Holland) as a political threat and kill him. And she can’t just crown her son the king, because, not being of age, he again, would be a target for assassination. The best thing she can do is what she does here, proclaim her confidence in her lost husband’s survival and stall for time. Realistically, she can only do this until her son comes of age. Then her son will have to claim the throne and all hell will break loose.

Sinon (Elliot Page) dies at the beginning of the movie (i.e. the end of the Trojan War), but comes back onto the screen at the midway point in the Land of the Dead to warn Odysseus of the dangers at home. He speaks of Antinious' pledge to support his father and how, when he showed up in the Land of the Dead, his father was the first to greet him. Sinon provides Odysseus a token that Antinious will recognize as the promises he didn’t keep. This exchange is paid off handsomely in the final scenes. Again, there is nothing in the book that provides the character arcs of these two added figures. In the text, Odysseus doesn’t know any of the suitors by name. Nolan added Sinon and Antinious and they do much to hold together the frame of the movie while Odysseus goes on his many journeys between the flagposts.

It is also a testament to Nolan that he puts much effort into strengthening the weaker segments of the journey, as opposed to omitting them entirely or gliding over them, so that all scenes have their merit (a good idea in a 3-hour movie). A particularly good example is Odysseus' encounter with the land of the giant cannibals. The text is unsatisfying. Odysseus loses the majority of his men, and all of his ships but one, in the space of a few pages against a foe with no special characteristics. In the movie, these beings have been transformed into truly terrifying armor-plated giants that have mystifying control over the forest they dwell in. They look so cool, that this usually forgotten part of the story is being used for the movie poster. The scene is also a good example of Nolan’s use of practical effects as opposed to digital trickery. (It involves casting 7 foot tall actors as the giants, and using a 4 ft 11 inch stunt double for Matt Damon. An old Hollywood trick)

The world of 1000 B.C. was an unforgiving place, and within that unforgiving place was an even more unforgiving element, sea travel. One could see a person off on a sea voyage and not only have no idea if they would ever come back, but really have no idea of what actually befell them when or where. Once the boat passed the horizon literally anything could have happened to them. On the open sea/ocean, there are no witnesses. It is no surprise that in Shakespeare there is a consistent trope of shipwrecks and miraculous survivals. Since there was no way to tell if someone died in a shipwreck, there always existed some hope that they could come back someday. This primal hope of the return is as deep-seated as the fear of the traveller mentioned above.

The solution to this anxiety is to instill in society a “Golden Rule” culture, which extends hospitality to strangers. In turn, those strangers are to respect the house and possessions of those extending the hospitality. In The Odyssey, this is known as “Zeus’s Law” and it is mentioned frequently in the movie. Nolan adds one more thing that the writers of the Odyssey could not have possibly known. The story was born in a period of darkness, between the collapse of the Golden Age of Egypt and the Near East (of which Troy was a principal city) around 1100 B.C. and the revitalization of Ancient Greece, circa 600 B.C. One of the cited causes of this first dark age were invasions by “Sea Peoples”. (This phrase comes from contemporaneous Egyptian Heiroglyphs). Nolan makes a connection that the original Trojan Horse is a violation of Zeus’ law since it takes advantage of hospitality, and also makes a connection that the sack of Troy is an invasion by “Sea Peoples”. This is not ahistorical per se (the Mycenaeans did invade by ship) but it would certainly be a surprise to the Mycenaeans to be described as such. Nor would anyone in Ancient Greece conclude that the Trojan Horse was a harbinger and/or the cause of the dark times to come. Instead, they celebrated Odysseus’ cunning. Again, this is an addition by Nolan, but it is not unwelcome. Really the most satisfying element in this movie is Nolan’s ability to meld modern morals onto this ancient tale and still keep and earn its climatic ending, that most primal of cautionary tales. I bet this tale lasts another 1000 years.