It’s 2055 and a vast grey tower in the now-iceless wastes of the Arctic houses all the historical records and greatest artworks of the near-vanished human race.
Guarding it is the Global Archivist (Pete Postlethwaite), who addresses us via a computer screen and asks: why didn’t we do something back at the start of the century while we still had the chance? How could we have been so stupid?
This eco-sermon from director Franny Armstrong (McLibel) rams home even harder than An Inconvenient Truth, its urgent climate-change message: we need to take action and we need to take it now.
After that startling apocalyptic opening, the rest of the film – a collection of six present-day docu-studies looking at what people are or aren’t doing about the problem – goes a little off the boil, but it’s still trenchant stuff. But will it only be preaching to the choir? Probably – unless a few unwitting Rob Schneider fans are lured in by the title.
Philip Kemp
