Posted by Adam Gordon on May 15, 2009 in all, lifestyles & values, politics of the future | 0 comments
Apocalyptic predictions are designed to be wrong. The point of doing them, as with “1984,” “Brave New World,” “When the Wind Blows,” etc., is to raise consciousness to negative outcomes and engender action so that the prediction, by succeeding in purpose makes itself incorrect in fact. “The Age of Stupid” is this all over. See the trailer here:
There is also a documentary about how the movie was funded and made.
Set in 2055, post the environmental global climate change collapse, it features last-man-on-earth (Pete Postlethwaite) as an archivist in a tower refuge somewhere in the Arctic north of Norway sifting through records of human life before it was wiped out, trying to find out why people did nothing to stop the eco-catastrophe that was imminent. The plot device allows filmmaker Franny Armstrong, (director of McLibel, 2005, about environmentalists who successfully challenged McDonalds) to showcase a selection of real reportage and news clips from today to withering effect. Like any good scenario it gives granularity: dates, names, actions, timelines. It points fingers and mentally readies the reader-watcher to act.
By all accounts this is a punchier movie than Al Gore-fronted “An Inconvenient Truth (2006),” and punchy is what is required to effect the goals of a future-influencing forecasting, that is, an assault on the powers that be and/or on public complacency.
By the way, if you want to see the best activist consciousness-raising movie (ever!) see Pete Postlethwaite in the anti-Thatcherite “Brassed Off.”