(:)(:)(:)(:)(:) for An Inconvenient Sequel watched tonight with Houston on my mind. Although I wanted to see this film, I had low expectations. After all, you can only take so much Al Gore (I tried to write a clever quip about not avoiding movies with too much blood and “gore,” but it couldn’t get it off the ground), and the first film, An Inconvenient Truth, while certainly impactful, was less than exciting.
An Inconvenient Sequel, however, I found to be quite moving, inspiring, dramatic, and at times humorous. The filmmakers really knew what they were doing and put together a powerful piece that really uses the power of film to give us the emotional intensity of what’s at stake: this is the biggest disaster film of all time, the survival of the human race is at stake, we are marching against time and only Al Gore (and millions of other people working to beat the clock) can save us from extinction. Throw in the backdrop of Paris in the Paris Climate Conference and a dramatic deal put together by Gore and John Kerry to bring along India, and you’ve got yourself a real movie.
The film also hauntingly (but subtly) reminds us that only the Supreme Court stood between us and having had (former Vice President) Al Gore as president instead of George W. Bush. Although I have grieved that election many times, it wasn’t until I was watching this film that I got a palpable sense of how different history might have been had we the voters not had that election stolen from us.
Would 911 have succeeded the way it did for Al Qaida under President Al Gore? Could President Gore have much more quickly reduced our reliance on fossil fuels? How quickly could that have turned around the changes we are experiencing in the environmental climate? (to say nothing of the tectonic political climate changes we have experienced over the past 10 years)
In practically every single clip of Gore presenting his “slide show” (which has gotten a lot more exciting btw), he tells his live audience of some climate change aided disaster that is happening live as they spoke, showing pictures of drought, fire and especially flood devastation all over the world, in Miami, in the Philippines, including the devastating floods in Houston of April, 2016.
The live audience watching the film gasped audibly many times watching people rescue person after person from terrifying disasters, all of thinking of the devastation that is being experienced right now again in Houston again, only a little more than a year later. As Vice President Gore expressed his love and compassion for people after people after people who lost their homes, their family and their livelihoods to increasingly disastrous floods, he cracked open our hearts and our minds reminding us that it is always the poorest among us that are hardest hit by every one of these “natural” disasters.