Quick Movie Review: An Inconvenient Truth

Wait, what's this? A post not related to cycling? Yup :>>

Friday night I went to see Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth with Meg. It was good, but a bit on the long side. Actually, the movie could have been drilled down to a 30 minute short, but that wouldn't have fit the bill for a feature piece.

The bad: there were segments where he would go off on a tangent and I caught myself more than once go "and this has to do with global warming how?" He eventually brought everything together, but there were two pieces in particular that seemed to drift for a minute or two before he brought them full circle. There were some political jokes and jibs that will really turn off the people who could get the most out of this movie. They didn't really need to be there, but will work well as base motivators for '08.

The good: there was a lot of little pieces of information here and there that the average joe probably doesn't know. One of my favorites: of the 928 peer reviewed scientific papers on global warming in 2004, not one disputed it while 53% of pop-culture (NY Times, WashPost, etc.) news sources considered it a "theory" or unproven.

The mediocre: if you've followed this topic, you probably already know 95% of what's covered in the movie. There's nothing shocking in it. If you get all of your scientific news from the mainstream, then some of this will be news to you.

All-in-all, I've got to recommend this movie. It's got a message that needs to get out. The problem with it is that the people who could use to see it, the ones that consider global warming "an interesting theory", probably aren't going to go see it. And if they do, they'll be put off but a handful of politically slanted comments. Personally, I think Gore would have left the parisanship aside if he was really doing this to further his goals on this "moral issue" alone. The fact that he didn't suggests strongly to me that he's trying to keep his name in front of people for an '08 or '12 run for the big house again.