Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid

Screening Sat Jun 13: 9:30 and Sun Jun 14: 2

The Age of Stupid may not be my favorite film on climate change (I give that honor to An Inconvenient Truth) but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize it’s importance.  The film is a unique take on global warming and begins in the year 2055.  Our guide in the future is an old man played by Pete Postlethwaite and as he tells us about the future we learn things are pretty grim.  The world has been devastated and in trying to understand what went wrong our guide looks at “archive” footage from 2008.

Included in that footage are a few stories, my favorite being that of the 82-year-old French mountain guide Fernand Pareau. He has been observing the melting of the Alpine glaciers for some time now. Pareau’s love for the glaciers (he’s climbed them more than 150 times) is really endearing and helps to get across the real danger in losing natural places to global warming. It’s one thing to tell people that melting glaciers is dangerous, it’s another to see a person lose something they love.

Also standing out in the 2008 stories is Piers Guy, a British windfarm developer who doesn’t think windfarms will save us all but does think that they can make a difference.  The film follows his efforts to make windfarms happens despite a very anti-wind campaign group and in turn really gets to the heart of why progress is so hard to obtain in the fight for a greener planet.  What seems like common sense is harder to achieve than it should be.

Overall the film is a little uneven but I truly appreciate its efforts to provide climate change information in a new and interesting way.   People don’t want to watch the same film over and over again but it is so important to keep climate change in the front of our minds. So while The Age of Stupid may not be my favorite, it is doing something really good.

Also, be sure to check out Danny’s TakePart post featuring the trailer.