In the age of Trump, this feels dated
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power PG cert, 98 min
Gore. (Hoo! Yeah!) What is he good for? Making an impassioned, morally urgent case for action on climate change, say it again, y’all. And 11 years on from his Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the former US vice-president is making it again.
Like its predecessor, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is a far more accomplished piece of advocacy than filmmaking. Its star isn’t exactly overburdened with Hollywood charisma, and its argumentative manoeuvres are pulled off with the grace of a reversing bin lorry. But it still politely seizes you by the lapels, makes its case with range and precision, and sends you home with a carbon-neutral fire in your chest.
Directors Benni Cohen and Jon Shenk, replacing Davis Guggenheim, have switched the first film’s slideshow format with a kind of aide’s-eye-view perspective of Gore’s activities over the past two years. At its best, it offers a gripping account of the slow, gummy churn of the lobbying business: at worst it’s a little like a gap year video diary, with footage of Gore trudging across melting ice sheets and wading through floodwaters, then stopping to pick over the results of his failed 2000 US presidency bid, which is positioned here – entirely reasonably, if a tad egocentrically – as a wrong-way tipping point on US climate policy.
There are also excerpts from Gore’s latest roadshow, in which he briefs the faithful with bar charts, and a long spell at the Paris climate accords, during which Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, pops up genially, a little like the cameo appearance from Spider-man in Captain America: Civil War.
Cohen and Shenk don’t stint on featuring the pushback against the climate movement: in fact, the opening montage features various Republican talking heads inveighing against the original film, including one Donald J Trump. Yet, for the most part, the film feels oddly sluggish in its reaction to Trump’s surge to power. Inconvenient as it surely would have been, the ongoing political earthquake in the US and its consequences for Gore’s crusade surely merited an 11thhour restructuring of the film, which doesn’t seem to have happened.
Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris accord in June is acknowledged in a handful of captions: no doubt that was all there was time for, but it’s still a conspicuous gap. As a result, the film can’t help but seem dated on arrival: its heart is in the right place, but its finger feels a few beats behind the pulse. RC