The Age of Stupid
England, 2008, 89 minutes
Director: Franny Armstrong
Recently, because of the gravity of the situation, there’s been a wave of “guilt trip” films about the environment. It’s no longer contained to just documentaries, though docs tend to be more direct in said guilt-tripping. The Age of Stupid, alas, takes it to another level, resorting to insults now. It’s angry and preachy as all get-out, though that should be apparent from the title. Not everybody is willing to give 90 minutes of their time to being called stupid repeatedly by a movie, but given the mounting evidence spelling out our doom, maybe it is necessary to be so blunt.
The premise of the film is that it’s a science-fiction documentary. It opens with a montage of Earth’s devastation in 2055. The planet’s resources are depleted, its inhabitants are near extinction, and monuments are burning in that Jerry Bruckheimer fashion. Cheesy, but somewhat effective in setting up the film’s primary forecast: this is our future, and it’s all because we are all so freakin’ stupid today.
In the Q&A following the screening, director Franny Armstrong told us that the previous version of the film used to be much angrier. She and her assistant played a couple of surviving teens from the apocalyptic future, bitching at us for leaving them with a crappy world. They held one test screening of that version, which Armstrong described as “The single worst experience of my life.” It was received extremely poorly, since no one wanted to be lectured at by a couple of snotty kids. She then had the idea of making the lecturer an older man who lived through our present, effectively changing the key emotion of the film from anger to guilt.
Pete Postlethwaite plays The Archivist, a man living inside a giant Arctic museum full of Earth’s remnants. Throughout the film, the screen is his Minority Report-style computer screen, where he brings up archive footage from 2005-2008 showing us why we are heading for a severe downturn in the coming years (projected by scientists to be 2015). The method works because rather than hammering the same point over and over like most environmental docs, it presents a wide range of incidents that, in hindsight, lead to one conclusion.
“Why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance?” He wondered. “Was it because on some level, we knew we weren’t worth saving?” Dun dun dun. It’s easy to be harsh on the film because of the thick layer of cheese surrounding it, but Armstrong supports the legitimacy of such statements with compelling footage—the documentary portion of the film.
When she originally conceived the film in 2002, Armstrong wanted to make a documentary using the structure of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic: six separate stories with a single theme (but global warming instead of drug trafficking). Having completed it, she realized that it wasn’t strong enough as a film—it needed another hook. Enter the futuristic element, a natural fit given the recurring message of impending doom embedded in those stories. Keyword? Hindsight is 20/20.
They are plights from all over the world: an aging French mountain guide forced to watch his beloved glaciers melting over time, a Nigerian girl whose oil-rich village is devastated by Shell, a British engineer whose windfarm solution is rejected by locals not wanting to sacrifice the view out their window, a New Orleans man who rescued a hundred people by boat during Hurricane Katrina, a couple of Iraqi children taking refuse in Jordan and an Indian mogul starting up a low-cost airline for the poor.
These stories are rich for the diversity, but also because they reveal an underlying hypocrisy in how they contribute to the planet’s demise. Jeh Wadia, for example, is a philanthropist who wants to eradicate India’s poverty and introduce a low-cost alternative to his country’s marred transportation system, but his advocacy of more flying only contributes to more reliance on jet fuel.
We all create excuses to vindicate our destruction, Armstrong said, adding that her sin is her justification of flying all over the world to promote her planet-saving documentary.
The accomplishment doesn’t stop with just the film’s success, though. In the UK, where the film has received plenty of attention, the producers of The Age of Stupid were approached by various politicians and world leaders who wanted to use the film to advance environmental causes. After speaking to them, the President of Maldives announced that his country will be the first country to go completely carbon neutral within the next ten years.
The big fish right now is this December’s Copenhagen conference, where governments will meet for the last time before renewing the Kyoto Treaty, which Armstrong believes is going to be remembered as the single most important event of our generation. For that purpose, they’ve set up Not Stupid, a campaign to turn movie audiences into activists.
The Age of Stupid will have its US release in September, but it’s not the only way you can see it. The producers are allowing the purchase of a screening license on this website starting May 22nd, so anyone can hold their own screening and keep all the money to themselves. It’s a pretty great incentive, as it can only help spread the word of the cause.
