![]() Put cruelly: we’ve seen native people crying on camera before. The tribe’s argument is water-tight and their passion evident, but neither Klein nor Lewis finds a way to break from convention. We’re introduced to the miners – well-paid itinerant workers with no connection to the land – and to the indigenous people who call it home. We start at the Alberta tar sands in Klein’s native Canada, where “the overburden” (pesky things like trees, grass, soil, clay) is being stripped from hundreds of thousands of square miles to get to the oil reserves underneath. Instead we’re taken on a world tour of the communities who are fighting back against the exploit-and-move-on free market mindset. But Lewis struggles to present that complexity in the film. These thought processes are, when you think about it, products of human nature too. And about how capitalism was established on that, allowing us to disconnect ourselves from the natural world to the extent that it’s still difficult for some of us to take environmental apocalypse seriously. It’s instead due to a 400-year-old story we’ve told ourselves about nature being a force that we have mastered. The thrust here seems to be that our listlessness in the face of the devastating effects of climate change is not – as we’re often told - the result of human nature. The arguments from Klein’s well-reviewed book are simplified and a little muddled in the film. It does, to its credit, go easy on the polar bears. It’s sometimes boring, it makes assumptions about its audience. Unfortunately Lewis’s film - despite its good looks and fine intentions - fails in exactly the same ways. The breadth of the problem is too large to filter through relatable characters easily. Climate change documentaries struggle to make the story personal. ![]() It’s a bold move for any documentary, let alone one with such a hyperbolic title, to flame its antecedents.
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