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The Age of Stupid (2009)

Director: Franny Armstrong

Time Out rating

Average user rating

13 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

There’s no shortage of films about climate change. The challenge for campaigning environmentalists like Franny Armstrong – whose last film, ‘McLibel’, followed the two British activists who faced McDonald’s in the high court – is to make something that cinemas will play and audiences will want to watch. Happily, this sparky documentary is a good stab at popularising awareness of the impending crisis: you could see it as the more emotional sibling to the more rational brother of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

Apocalyptic fiction sits alongside modern reportage: Pete Postlethwaite plays the last man on earth in 2055, sitting in front of a computer screen in a watery refuge somewhere north of Norway and using touch-screen technology to call up various global reports from 2009. We flit between six main stories, from Jeh Wadia, a forceful Indian entrepreneur on the verge of opening his country’s third low-cost airline while also harbouring a dream of eradicating domestic poverty, to Fernand Pareau, a French mountain guide living in the Alps who has witnessed the speedy erosion of glaciers while the number of cars racing through the Mont Blanc tunnel past his home continues to rise.

The big theme is action versus conservatism: are Wadia’s twin goals of success and social change reconcilable? Another interviewee with a similar dilemma is Piers Guy, a British wind energy developer who is forever fighting communities who support his technology but still refuse to let turbines near their homes. Armstrong’s prognosis is apocalyptic, but her journalism is solid, instructive and pleasingly thoughtful, largely avoiding a black-and-white and familiar approach to the subject. Entertaining and provocative.

Author: Dave Calhoun 2009-03-17 10:47:23

Time Out London Issue 2013 , March 19 - 25, 2009

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User reviews of this film

Vipul said...

Posted on May 29 2009 14:33 I was sceptical about whether a film could have a positive impact on so many indifferent people out there. Those that find all manner of excuse to avoid taking their share of the responsibility for the staggering damage we inflict on our world – letting the poor and defenceless of the world pay the heaviest price while we revel in our luxurious lifestyles.
I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the film is – it points to the simple undeniable truth that we, the developed world and the rich, use more than our fair share of resources and at a rate higher than the Earth can tolerate.
Ignore the naysayers – they may be more interested in their throwaway iPods and wasteful lifestyles than facing the truth that every resource they consume means that someone or something out there goes without basic food and water.
This film is, to my mind, about waking up and having a conscience – that if we do what is right and moral, we can have a happier, cleaner, more enjoyable and safer world. Moreover, we can achieve this while not spending our lives battling to earn enough money to buy the junk and excesses that marketers falsely tell us we need to make us happy.
It all boils down to our needing to be decent and think about the people and life around us instead of being the selfish, amoral and greedy type that created this mess.

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john said...

Posted on Apr 29 2009 23:02 my local rag has got a full page spread on this film,nice to know tax payers money is going to help promote age of stupid,lambeth living is the paper.this film is a piece of fiction even lizzie gillett the films producer states that,even so she still bangs on about we are going to die if we dont go green,mizz gillett wants to organise green groups to save the planet,bla bla,sounds all very chairman mao to me.organise the people to their way of thinking,

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Flu-Bird said...

Posted on Apr 06 2009 20:49 All those stupid and rediclous predictions by the eco-wackos back in the 1970s of a earth so poluted we would need to wear gas masks to go outside or our cities under giant domes or how we have only ten years left to save the planet and still they tell us this bunk and the lap dog press laps it all up SO STUPID SO REDICULOUS ARE THE ECO-FREAKS

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I'm With Kate said...

Posted on Mar 31 2009 01:36 I'm With Kate.

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Kate said...

Posted on Mar 21 2009 08:29 The scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.
Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3ºC, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1ºC cooler than the 1979-1998 average.
Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. Recently in New York for two days distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tore apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.
Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google "Heartland" and "Quadrant".

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Dave said...

Posted on Mar 20 2009 10:15 The documentary aspects of the film were good and relevant, but I feel with the inclusion of the narative it became extremely preachy, and on occasions misdirected in the point that they were trying to put across with more focus on capitalism at time.

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Ellie said...

Posted on Mar 19 2009 16:28 Quite honestly the BEST film i have ever seen.
Certainly not unnecessarily anti - capitalist but it is an inescapable truth that the way of life to date of much of the west (ie. that of a capitalist society) is largely responsible for the mess we are in).
Offered the audience realistic ways in which action could be taken that would effectively channel their desire to 'do something' upon leaving the cinema.
And methane from cows is largely due to our insatiable desire to eat vast amounts of cheap meat....

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Nigel said...

Posted on Mar 19 2009 11:43 A thought provoking film which supports in an entertaining way the fears of the majority of scientists. Lets hope the population and our politicians act swiftly to ration carbon dioxide output to allow society enough time to accommodate the effects of climate change.

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Dean said...

Posted on Mar 18 2009 23:49 Pretty awful. Trite, self-serving and rather hypocritical. Basically a sugar-coated ant-capitalist rant - it's the equivalent of softer "intelligent design" instead of creationism. No mention of nuclear power, carbon capture, population control, geoengineering, hydrogen etc. It's narrow-minded and political rhetoric masquerading as a populist environmental documentary. Some nice editing though.

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Julian said...

Posted on Mar 18 2009 21:33 Some very good storylines. Perhaps the most poignant the apparent failed promises of Shell to the Nigerians living close to their oil facilities. There is a really good animation to describe the converge and contract solution to emission reductions that most politicians see as the fairest way to go (but they may never agree). One missed opportunity was a clearer more audible account of how the climate may alter between now and 2055. Mark Lynas was the expert behind the future scenarios but it all went too fast and below my threshold of hearing to know how bas Mark Lynas thinks it will be.
A very thought provoking film which everybody should see whether they want to or not. It will wake you up and make you think seriously about the future.

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Jamie said...

Posted on Mar 18 2009 13:42 An emotional and sobering film. Treads the fine line between explaining the urgent reality of the science and sensationalising the potential impacts well. The human stories are complex and compelling, showing the inherent contradictions of the human condition. A must see for all who possess a remotely open mind.

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Paul said...

Posted on Mar 18 2009 13:30 A missed opportunity. Too much anti-capitalism and virtually nothing about the real carbon problem; methane from cattle.

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Ben said...

Posted on Mar 18 2009 13:24 Hysterical, in both senses of the word.

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