Watched Another Film
1st Jun 2010
When it came out I thought that Age of Stupid sounded a bit gimmicky. Not so it seems.
The premise is straight-forward. Pete Poselthwaite is the sole survivor of the human race and resides in a huge international archive edifice.Not much attention is paid to him as a character, his life-situation, or indeed whether anybody else has survived. Instead we see him swiping and clicking his way across a large touch-screen monitor (from the inside) recalling what happened to the planet in order to get to the situation it is in. The year is 2055 and the cause of Armageddon is Climate Change. The film is a very slick and clever documentary comprised itself of numerous clips from other documentaries and interviews which have already graced our screens. The message is loud and clear, we're messing up the planet and it's almost too late to do anything about it. Watch it for yourself and draw your own conclusion. We sat in silence for five minutes or so when it finished and then spent half an hour discussing what we could do to make a difference. Sure, us making a difference won't in itself alter the course of history, but it became clear after just a few minutes discussion that at least we'd be doing something. Perhaps the biggest thing that we figured we could do was to use some of the events that I organise in some way. The day after the film I contacted a friend at Sheffield Hallam University to ask whether they have a student or three who might be interested in running an environmental audit on Cliffhanger which is coming up in July. Not with a view to doing much this year, we've only got a month left, but with a view to producing some thoughts for the future of the event. It's a start. I won't bother preaching about what else we're doing, suffice to say that it's more than we were before watching the film. I would preach at you to watch it and make up your own minds. Even if it's entirely wrong, and I sincerely hope that it is, it's givvn food for thought and some genuine well intentioned action to boot.