I have yet to see it, but I have some trouble with the standard whereby "An Inconvenient Truth" is evaluated here on Slate by Gregg Easterbrook.
A trouble with film activism is that it invites being picked apart. Given time constraints and audience considerations, the movie will not be perfectly measured in every statement, nor will it be comprehensive on every possible issue that might be raised. The easy way out for a review is to find a couple loose ends to knock the filmakers for leaving untied and build around that. Is every statement as careful as possible? Is enough time spent on solutions?
A critic using this approach, might be invited by the moralistic tone and message of the film to cast his criticism in moral terms. But that misses a more fundamental moral and critical evaluation:
Given the restraints of the medium does the movie serve to inform or misinform compared to the baseline--ie, compared to the news media's complete failure to convey the character of the scientific consensus to the population?
Easterbrooks review offers some interesting questions for further discussion, like whether stopping global warming requires "deprivation"and what the c/b on that would be, but that's just it: those are questions for further discussion not shortcomings of the film. The moral failure is for Eastbrook to set "An Inconvenient Truth" up for evaluation against his perfectly nuanced ideal film, rather thanevaluating it on its own terms, within the constraints of the medium, and against the status quo popular information sources on climate change. This is a moral failure because his review and reviews like his (which are many) mute the impact of the film against the status quo, wherein the public is deliberately mislead.
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