Something's different about Al Gore these days. Gone is the wooden body language, the hectoring monotone, the sense that he isn't all that thrilled to be anywhere he is. An Inconvenient Truth reveals a new, improved Al, affable, engaging, and with impeccable comic timing possibly honed from appearances on Saturday Night Live.
Which is really good news, as basically, Truth is an assemblage of PowerPoint presentations by the "former next president of the United States." Which sounds like a new peak in dull. But dull it ain't: An Inconvenient Truth is nothing less than a terrifying nonfiction horror film about the devastating collusion of nature and could-give-a-crap governance.
Gore's basic thesis: The science is in, global warming is real and unless we do something about it, we're royally screwed on a planetary level.
Gore points out that last year 628 studies looked at that human-created global warming and its attendant global, catastrophic effects. The number of articles that disagreed that global warming exists and will only get catastrophically worse: zero.
Meanwhile, more than 50 percent of mainstream media coverage still dithered on whether global warming even exists, while an administration literally invested in global warming's main ingredient—fossil-fuel pollutants—maintains its sterling record of doing jack about it.
With source-footnoted graphics, comedy asides and Simpsons animation(!) as support, Gore catalogs the undeniable side effects of global warming. The increased fury of hurricanes via unnaturally warm ocean-water currents, which, in the case of Katrina, caused that hurricane to explode from Category 3 to Category 5; the ongoing extinction of hundreds of species; the evaporation of lakes, which is the base cause of the horrors we're seeing in Darfur. And coming soon to a future apocalypse near you: the melting of the ice caps causing, among other prime real estate, Manhattan, South Florida and goodly portions of India to become underwater realms. (If you thought evacuating New Orleans was an unholy mess, imagine having to do the same for millions.)
The 800-pound elephant in the room, of course, is the Bush administration. To his credit, Al only directly mentions it as a way of illustrating the revolving door between the oil business and the W regime, and the cronyism, corruption and deception defining both.
For example, we get the story of one Phil Cooney, who went from being an oil industry lobbyist to Bush's choice for staff chief at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (where he censored the presidents' own scientists' findings on global warming) to a tasty gig at Exxon. A profusion of inarguable facts regarding America's emission standards and their devastating results further evoke Bush's legacy—that is, everything has mysteriously gotten exponentially worse since 2000. A coincidence, surely.
Director Davis Guggenheim breaks from the presentation to show us Gore's backstory—the childhood defined by the natural beauty of the Tennessee hills, how his sister's early death and a college professor's environmental concerns sparked a lifelong eco-mission. These bits are probably present to help negate naysayers' accusations of baseless, knee-jerk tree-huggery, but they also veer dangerously close to hagiography.
But that's small beans, quibble-wise. In a way, Truth is almost critic-proof. That is, it's really the sort of nonhysterical, just-the-facts reporting that should be, for example, broadcast on network TV every night for a month. Gore repeatedly declares that this is a moral, not political, issue. He's right, and so is deciding whether or not you will see this film and follow its end-title suggestions on how regular people, failed by their leaders, can take action.