Review of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017) by Matt C — 08 Aug 2017

I don't think it's really that easy to apply the general rules of film criticism to those that operate almost solely on their sociopolitical rhetorics, so I don't think that it's necessarily worthy to bust out an entire five or six paragraphs on the pros and cons on a film such as An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.

It is, by its very nature, a movie that most people will know whether or not they will dislike on a core level, making the subjectivity of an opinion attaining to it is by and large more moot than general.

That being said, I rewatched An Inconvenient Truth yesterday for the first time in years, and I had forgotten just how boring it was. Despite my agreeing with its agenda, it was really just a glorified PowerPoint via a pre-TED Talk presentation that happened to enter the zeitgeist due to the clout of its creator, and its sequel is actually a bit worse not due to the having the same issues but because of its messiness and constant self-centeredness.

The biggest issue with this isn't necessarily its general lack of cinematic qualities-even for a documentary. It's the fact that the lightning-in-a-bottle success of its predecessor cannot be fully recaptured 11 years later, even if it is more entertaining and happened to arrive at a time where more people, including myself, are mad as hell at the world and what people are doing to it as a whole.

Instead, directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk just settle on sloppily putting together a 99-minute montage of "I told you so!" moments. With Al Gore at the center of it all, it feels more like an ego-stroking marathon than a real call to action.

Those involved didn't seem to really try here, which is a shame. It's like the torture porn craze in horror films-instead of something effective and intellectual, the filmmakers just make it Gore-y as hell.

Interestingly enough, the movie's stronger moments tend to unintentionally speak to the larger issue of documentary filmmaking in today's day in age. With such an onslaught on constant and seemingly infinite information by way of the Internet, alternative news networks, and "woke" millennials, archival footage of the generic sorts as showcased here as well as their shared framing devices make Truth to Power feel pointless in how a vast majority of its information could be conveyed more efficiently in different media, such as but not limited to YouTube videos, web articles, or clips from The Young Turks.

In its insistence on being a theatrically released feature film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is so often both underwhelming and frustrating in its lack of cohesion. There's not much more that I can say here, which is telling not just because of the film's failure in galvanizing its viewers, but because that is, in theory, what it exists to do.

4.4/10, lame, C-, below average, etc.