Review of The Age of Stupid (2009) by Jean-Francois V — 05 Jan 2010

"The Age of Stupid" is like one of those TV programs consisting of four of five reports on various interconnected topics, except these reports are intermingled and bound together by the conceit of a future narrator (a multi-billionaire who is given the rugged, proletarian face of Pete Postlethwaite) shown viewing archives from the early XXIst century and reflecting on how stupid you and I were.

The problem with the film is that the futuristic conceit (global warming has happened, the ecosystem and, with it, human civilisation have collapsed, look what you've done) is nothing more than an afterthought, the bulk of the movie consisting in the 2007 interviews and reports. The filmmakers have not bothered to work out a realistic worst-case scenario in detail, but simply scare you with blurred views of climate refugees, a decrepit Taj Mahal and an accelerated future history consisting of overlapping soundbites, and prefer to devote about 90% of the future action to Pete Postlethwaite pretending to be editing his archives using virtual reality moves a la Tom Cruise in "Minority Report.".

Another flaw of the film is that it says almost nothing about the science of global warming. And very much like a Michael Moore movie, it shoots at anything that moves, blurring issues (making Shell responsible for all the violence and injustice in Africa, for instance) and literally simplifying things to the level of funny, fast-paced cartoons narrated by children.

Where the film does succeed is in showing us how self-contradictory and mutually contradictory we all are. Indeed, rather than "The Age of Stupid", it could have been called "The Age of Contradiction". One of XXIst century protagonists of the film, for instance, is a retired oil industry engineer, who lost everything in the Katrina hurricane, and claims to have learned that happiness does not lie in possessions, and that we have been squandering our resources (he is the originator of the title), but says he would not do anything differently if he were to live his life over again, and now seems to delight mostly in smoking, drinking, riding his bike and fishing. British citizens who claim to care about global warming are also shown defeating an attempt to build windmills close to their property. And while a British couple save on carbon by growing their own food and cutting on their plane trips, and an eighty-year old mountain guide rather ineffectively tries to slow down invasive trucking through the Mont Blanc tunnel, a super-rich Indian entrepreneur plans to eliminate world poverty by creating a low cost airline company, reducing all the efforts of those well-meaning environmentalists to nil.

However anecdotal it might be, the film is nevertheless worth seeing, and although it is nothing more than a patchwork, it almost miraculously manages to come to a rather emotional climax.