An Inconvenient Sequel

An Inconvenient Sequel

You walk into a press screening these days and there’s no guarantee your head is clear. Check your phone before walking into a movie and you might read that a career senator took advantage of his office’s health care plan, had a cancerous growth removed from his leg, then hobbled onto the floor of the Senate to cast a vote saying no other American deserves that treatment. How are you supposed to feel anything but revulsion when you then sit down to watch a movie about a lifelong environmentalist meeting fierce resistance from the planet he’s trying to save? How is this movie not going to seem both more timely and like a complete waste of everyone’s time?

“An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power” (even the title screams for your attention over the deafening silence) chronicles an ongoing and exhausting battle to get the world to stop consciously annihilating itself, but it’s also implicitly about fighting for your attention. Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk do their best to make Al Gore’s climate studies look like the life or death struggle they are, but they’re racing against both an ever shrinking news cycle and the real-time erosion of our civil liberties, and frankly they don’t want it as bad as those things do.

We pick up with Al Gore in 2015, looking considerably older than he did in “An Inconvenient Truth,” if not necessarily wiser. With his slow gait, gray hair, dad jokes (“I used to be the next president of the United States”) and general demeanor of someone who always says grace before eating out at Applebee’s with friends from church who have never disappointed him by having something interesting or useful to say about politics even national politics! Gore feels slightly out of step with American discourse (or what passes for it).

He’s still giving his PowerPoint presentation on how capitalism is affecting global warming, only now it includes images of cities submerged under 25 feet of water. He wants to come off folksy, another Jimmy Carter selflessly giving whatever he’s got left to the country that rejected him, but his anger sometimes gets the better of him. Frankly, if he were angrier more often this movie might not exist. As it is, he’s outmatched and outnumbered, and all we can say about him is that at least he hasn’t quit.

Of course, you can afford not to quit when you’ve got as much time and money as Gore does to spend on your passion project for saving the planet from itself. But what about the rest of us?

This is a movie that takes place largely in board rooms and hotel rooms, where some of the most powerful people on Earth talk to Al Gore about considering cap and trade measures so their countries don’t keep polluting the planet like there’s no tomorrow (which, at this rate). Shenk and Cohen take a few calculated risks by showing us who’s in these rooms five years ago it might have been heartening to see Cory Booker dutifully listening while Gore held forth during a Senate committee hearing; now that Booker has been exposed as just another bought politician with ties to pharmaceutical companies, his attention feels like little more than an empty promise from one friend who knows another friend will never call him on it. I couldn’t watch Booker pretend listen to Gore without seeing him embrace McCain on the floor after voting to kill Obamacare. With friends like these …

Gore ambles through flooded streets and cemeteries like John Wayne in “The Shootist.” He’s surrounded by tokens of past failures at every turn, each new victory slightly less qualified than the last. It’s clear how flimsy his future is; thankfully he refuses to accept that reality but heroically continues trying anyway.

At his most humane, Gore is shown watching Floridian public servants with sweaty smiles confess that things have never been this bad and then sitting down to take off his socks in a way that feels like he just got home from a fishing trip; at his most out of touch and desperate (it’s worth noting Musk immediately went to work for Donald Trump when asked, though he did retire in June), speaking into a golden cell phone, dropping Elon Musk’s name in the hopes someone will consider him seriously.

The movie breaks even on its portrait of Gore and his reaction to setbacks the Paris terrorist attacks push back a call-to-action broadcast; listening to the mayor of some small town in Texas commit that they’re going to use 100% renewable energy, only for him to say “leave the world in better shape than you found it” (he didn’t mean human rights). I was handed a 30-page press kit about recycling as I walked into this movie. How are we supposed to believe this planet stands a chance? In the final minutes of the film, Gore sits and tries to rally himself after realizing he can’t stop the election of the 45th President. We’ve all felt that sadness for others, if not ourselves.

The film opens and closes with time-lapse footage of glaciers melting. But those images have never been enough: It’s been ten years since “An Inconvenient Truth” told everyone in black-and-white how fucked we were if we didn’t shape up. A lot of people listened; just as many mocked him and encouraged us not to care.

This is now what happens: One morning before school, during my senior year there was an assembly held by an organization called Impact Earth which showed us videos about burning rainforests and starving polar bears projected onto tin foil screens until they looked silver enough to be seen from space one girl started crying because her dad worked at a factory that made aerosol cans, which were killing the planet; one of our more popular teachers told her not to believe everything she saw “An Inconvenient Sequel” shows the twilight of one of our most coherent champions.

The glaciers have not stopped melting; every day brings worse news. Gore has never given into despair. “Despair can be paralyzing,” he says at one point, accidentally but appropriately sounding like Kyle MacLachlan in “Dune.” (That’s a story about a man trying to save an arid planet from corpulent fascists.) Despair is all we’ve got some days; and try though it might, this film can’t curb it. The best “An Inconvenient Sequel” can offer is him: Gore, nearly 70, refusing to stand down. It’s inspiring, but they have to know it’s not enough. I was moved by the movie, then I stepped outside and looked at my phone.

Watch An Inconvenient Sequel For Free On Gomovies.