Oliver Stone turns sceptic on nuclear critics
• New documentary hyped as a counterweight to Al Gore’s classic ‘An Inconvenient Truth’
No major US director has so consistently taken a contrarian viewpoint on American orthodoxy than Oliver Stone.
For more than four decades, the once gung-ho patriot turned disillusioned sceptic has challenged the official line to oppose everything from his country’s Cold War interference in the affairs of Latin America (Salvador) to its failures in Vietnam (Platoon); its glorification of capitalist profiteering (Wall Street) and its acceptance of the Warren report’s findings on the Kennedy assassination (JFK).
Stone has also excoriated the controversial presidencies of Richard Nixon (Nixon), George W Bush (W) and the reaction of the Obama presidency to the disclosures of government surveillance made by whistleblower Edward Snowden (Snowden).
Those are only the targets of the three-time Oscar-winning director’s feature film career —
in recent years Stone has made a series of controversial documentaries that allowed the director to make friends with a number of US enemies including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin — the last laying the basis for a docuseries Stone released as The Putin Interviews in 2017 and for which he was roundly criticised by the mainstream media.
When the invasion of Ukraine seemed inevitable in early 2022, Stone was unsurprisingly sceptical of the official narrative around the invasion, arguing that Putin had been provoked by the US and Nato and that Russia had no intention to invade the whole of the Ukraine and was only concerned with stabilising the Donbas region. Stone later changed his tune, decrying his old friend’s aggression as “unjustified”.
In true Stone fashion then, his latest documentary, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 2022 ahead of its US theatrical release in April, seems to be taking a typically contrarian view on a hot-button topic that’s getting tongues wagging before it’s even been seen.
Nuclear Now is based on A Bright Future, a 2019 book by Joshua Goldstein that argues for nuclear energy as the cleanest, safest and most economically efficient solution to the energy crisis. Stone was given unprecedented access to the inner sanctums of the nuclear industry in the US, France and Russia in order to make the film.
As he told the Hollywood Reporter in Venice, he believes his argument is hopeful and positive and aims to get audiences to rethink the fear with which they’ve been told to approach the topic ever since the Cold War when nuclear power and its evil twin the nuclear bomb were lumped together in the popular imagination.
Stone argues that in spite of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, nuclear energy remains the most viable way to save the planet in the short time we have left before the effects of climate change will no longer be reversible. “Climate change has brutally forced us to take a new look at the ways in which we generate energy as a global community. Long regarded as dangerous in popular culture, nuclear power is in fact hundreds of times safer than fossil fuels and accidents are extremely rare.”
That’s an argument that should sit well with our own mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe, who has long advocated nuclear energy as a better solution to SA’s energy crisis than renewables. Whether that means we’ll soon have a ministry sponsored screening and visit by Stone to our shores remains to be seen but for now it seems certain that Stone’s documentary will upset many greens and climate activists who believe that the environmental risks and enormous costs of nuclear power far outweigh its proposed benefits.
Stone and film distributor Participant Media are hyping the film as a “follow-up or counterweight” to former US vice-president Al Gore’s 2006 Oscar-winning wakeup call An Inconvenient Truth, which had helped to draw public attention to the urgency of the climate crisis. But times have changed radically in the 17 years since Gore’s film was released and global public debate on climate change is characterised by extreme opinions on both sides of the political spectrum that have more in common with each other than before.
What once seemed to be Stone’s leftist anti-official narrative approach may now seem just centrist sensibility in an age when both the left and the right share worryingly similar attitudes and conspiracy-addled theories about Putin, vaccinations and Big Pharma and an intense dislike — for different reasons — of the despairing admonishments of Greta Thunberg to world leaders who have failed to act on climate change.
Whatever its arguments Nuclear Now looks set to change a few undecided minds in the middle and go unnoticed by many others who are busy proving that Covid-19 was manufactured in a lab by Big Pharma and that everything you thought you knew is fake news.
That’s the tragic irony for Stone, a filmmaker whose constant challenges to official narratives may have inadvertently helped to create a situation in which nobody really listens to anybody anymore and everyone prefers their echo chambers to reasoned conversation and debate.