Stephen Holden, The New York Times 17 Jul 09;
In “The Age of Stupid,” a frightening jeremiad about the effects of climate change, the craggy-faced British actor Pete Postlethwaite plays the Archivist, a finger-pointing, futuristic voice of doom in 2055. Peering into a retrospective crystal ball that shows scenes from the early 21st century, he scolds the human race for having committed suicide.
The curator of the Global Archive, a storage site of human knowledge in what is now a melted Arctic, the Archivist presses a rewind button on a touch screen to show documentary scenes related to climate change that were shot when there was still time for humanity to save itself. At the end of “The Age of Stupid,” which uses crude animation that depicts London underwater, Sydney burning and Las Vegas buried in sand, the Archive is sent into space.
A much sterner and more alarming polemic than “An Inconvenient Truth,” “The Age of Stupid,” directed by Franny Armstrong, will be taken by some as an emergency wake-up call to do everything possible to avert impending catastrophe. In the film Mark Lynas, the British environmental activist and author of “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet,” warns of a tipping point around 2015 if the world doesn’t immediately act to reduce carbon emissions. Once global temperatures warm more than two degrees, he says, all will be lost.
Others may find the challenges to humanity posed by the documentary so daunting that “The Age of Stupid” (the Archivist’s sarcastic nickname for our time) may convince viewers that, practically speaking, it is already too late to act. Cynics may assume that the ethic of consumerism is too deeply instilled in us to be changed, as is the faith in capitalism, which depends on continuous growth. If so, we might as well put the coming horrors out of our minds and live for the moment, while hoping for a miracle.
The personal stories among which the film hopscotches examine specific situations. Two involve big oil. We meet a retired paleontologist, who worked for Shell Oil, discovering new resources off the coast of New Orleans, but who also helped rescue more than 100 people after Hurricane Katrina. This was a disaster that the Archivist, looking back, says was only the first of many similar meteorological catastrophes related to climate change.
A young woman who dreams of becoming a doctor lives in an impoverished Nigerian village where Shell operates a drilling operation. She fishes in the oil-polluted waters to raise money for her education. She laments the paradox of “the resource curse,” in which oil wealth contributes to a country’s poverty by putting riches in the hands of a greedy, corrupt few who neglect the education and health of a country while contaminating the environment.
An octogenarian mountaineer in the French Alps observes how the melting of glaciers has necessitated the construction of longer ladders for climbers to reach them. Another vignette revolves around Iraqi children who hate the United States and blame the American lust for oil for the war.
The two stories that best exemplify the difficulties faced by environmentalists have to do with a fledgling Indian airline and a proposed wind farm in the English countryside. Jeh Wadia, an entrepreneur in Mumbai who is starting a low-cost airline, believes he is doing good by helping the economy in India. But as Piers Guy, a wind-farm developer in England who carefully measures his carbon footprint, says, air travel is a major contributor to global warming. Mr. Guy’s campaign to build turbines that would produce wind energy in Bedfordshire is vehemently opposed by residents because it will spoil their views and lower their property values.
A thread of needling gallows humor runs through “The Age of Stupid.” Near the end of the film the Archivist wonders: “Why didn’t we save ourselves? Was the answer that we weren’t sure we were worth saving?” He may have a point.
