An Inconvenient Truth or Posted by: Joe Tracy, Publisher

When An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters in late Spring, it opened to rave reviews. The Los Angeles Times called it “quite rousing.” Roger Ebert gave it a big thumbs up, saying that if you don’t see the movie, you will have to tell your grandchildren why. Variety called the documentary an “excellent educational tool.” Review after review heaped high praise for this “powerful” documentary.

I was excited to see “An Inconvenient Truth”. The press made the documentary sound like it was invigorating, exciting, and a step above any other documentary ever made. I was excited to learn more about global warming. I was interested to see Al Gore tackle an important subject in a major medium that gurus like Michael Moore have mastered. Perhaps Gore had found a new calling that he, too, could master.

So is this global warming documentary worthy of the praise bestowed upon it or are the press simply showing their true colors because the person who stars in it is Al Gore?

Unfortunately, director Davis Guggenheim fails miserably at the creation and execution of this documentary. To set the record straight, the information Al Gore presents in the documentary is important. Every American should hear it and understand it. Unfortunately, the way the information is presented by Guggenheim is extremely amateurish at best. Most of the “documentary”, in fact, is simply filming Al Gore giving a “live” seminar and slide presentation on the subject of global warming. We don’t get to see scientists talking about the subject. And most of the time Al Gore tries to cite an important fact or statistic, he attributes it to “a friend of mine”. Worse, Guggenheim breaks away from telling the story of global warming in order to bring up the election. It’s clear that while America has moved on from the terrible events of that election year, Gore is still brooding and wants people to know, even if he does it in a documentary that’s supposedly about global warming.

The main problem with An Inconvenient Truth is that when it is over, you’re not sure whether you just watched a documentary on global warming or one on what Al Gore has been doing since the Supreme Court ended his presidential election bid. The film fails at establishing a clear purpose.

The media who heaped high praise onto An Inconvenient Truth should be ashamed of themselves for forgetting that a documentary isn’t just about a talking head or setting a camera up at someone’s seminar then putting it on the big screen. It’s about presentation. Why didn’t we see interviews with scientists, leaders, and everyday Americans concerned about global warming? Why weren’t the majority of “facts” presented backed up? Why were many sources cited only as “a friend of mine”? Mind you, the information is good in An Inconvenient Truth, but the presentation is amongst the worse of any documentary ever created. If you want to empower people to take the subject seriously then you need to show more people than just Al Gore talking about it.

Another problem with the documentary is that it doesn’t tackle “solutions” until the end credits. By then, nearly half the people are already leaving the theater. The information in the credits, about what you can do to help prevent global warming, is the most important information in the entire documentary. And yet it is relegated to text only at the end of the film? Major mistake.

Global warming is a serious issue. And if you can get beyond the terrible presentation of An Inconvenient Truth, you may become concerned enough about the problem to make it a priority in your living. Gore and Guggenheim had the perfect opportunity to capture the subject in an intelligent, thought-provoking, and visual manner. Yet to see it all virtually relegated to Gore on a stage in front of an audience, interspersed with “highlights” or “lowlights” from his life, really do this documentary, and the subject matter, a great injustice. In the end, it is the audience that is inconvenienced with the presentation.

In the meantime, skip the lackluster execution of this documentary and, instead, visit http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/index.html. You’ll learn a lot more in a shorter period of time.