A Pinoy Blog About Nothing

If you get to see only one movie this year, this should be it. Even if you don’t like watching movies, watch this. It is worth your time.

Forget that this movie has Al Gore, the Presidential Could’ve-Been. It’s the message that’s important. And it’s not even a boring documentary at that. The images and the ideas alone hurls this movie along. When the movie comes out on DVD, I’ll probably buy several copies and send it to some people.

Check out http://www.climatecrisis.net/ now.

Any person who has spent a significant amount of time on this planet can tell that the weather has been changing. Hotter summers, stronger storms. The culprit of course is global warming. The problem has been identified and has been a constant fodder for magazines and news that it seems like we’ve been living with it for a long time now. There’s also the idea that the problem so big, it’s out of our hands. And there lies the danger.

Al Gore, former VP of Bill Clinton and the man who Dubya Bush beat out in 2000 for the presidency of the US, delivers a chilling message. Apparently since Gore failed in the presidential bid, he has been going around the world, city by city giving slide shows. These aren’t your ordinary Powerpoint presentation with stock images from Windows. Within the slide shows are pictures of devastation and statistics of how global warming is changing the planet.

When we were watching the movie, we couldn’t help but gasp at the drastic changes happening to the environment with the past 10 years. What nature has forged for thousands of years to make life sustainable on this planet is being changed at an alarming rate. If Hemingway was alive now, he’d barely recognize Kilimanjaro. There’s barely no snow to speak of. If Che Guevarra was alive, he’d probably find a different cause to fight. The snow-capped mountains of South America are slowly melting. Soon the penguins of Antartica would have a shorter march.

If we’ve learned that some conflicts in our literature is about Man vs. Nature, then clearly Man is winning. He has managed to tame and exploit Nature as he sees fit. However, it might be a short-lived victory. Mr. Gore’s slide show gives the correlation between consumption and increase in extreme weather. He even addresses the issue of Global Warming as a cyclical pattern. He lives no room for argument.

The documentary is not so much as a preachy vehicle for Mr. Gore. To him, making the movie is just a way of reaching a bigger audience for his message. And what a message that is: if we don’t do anything soon, we’re cooked. Literally.