Brave Blue World

I recently watched this documentary with my family and kids over the weekend. I was eager to see what Matt Damon had to say about water!! All of my family enjoyed the film and learned something new including my 8 and 9 year old kids who have just informed me they would like to work in water!

The solutions presented were the right mix of science and story and the film really broke down some of the challenges in the water industry.

I hope there will be a Brave Blue part 2 or a series where they will go more into detail about each of the different areas within this complex industry.

(Beth's story was without doubt my favourite!)

Several testimonials, including some from some Hollywood celebrities, about their views and solutions on how to solve the global water crisis.

I never thought I would find a doc. about helping planet Earth and its population bad, until I saw this.

It is an absolute chaos, starting with inconsistencies about what is said by each interlocutor, to gross editing errors, like the images (it is at the level of hearing aid ads or telemarketing about smoothies machines) to the sound and the terrible choice of the soundtrack, but above all, for not giving us anything relevant to retain on such an important subject.

When dairy or meat production industries are not mentioned once, pretty much everything is said about the purpose of this "documentary".

Worth a few points for references to a couple of technologies that in the future may help solving the problem, but not right now.

I was shocked by how badly this film was put together. From the way it's edited, to the choice of music (and how it's laid into the film), to the cheesy introduction shots of the contributors, the jump cuts and sound cuts (you literally hear the cuts during Matt Damon's interview), down to the way it's written: not just cheesy commentary, hyperboles, random links trying to stitch scenes together and things which are obviously been written without even looking at the film (There's a hilarious moment where the commentary says "this man is... etc etc..etc... " over the shot of the sky. We only see the "man" in question after a few seconds. That's film-making 101). The most impressive vistas are actually stock shots (I even recognised some from the Shutterstock Library). It is disjointed and confused, cheesy, one-sided and simplistic, but I suppose the core message is probably what counts here (and how they were able to get people like Matt Damon and Liam Neeson), which is also why I'm not giving it 1 star. There are some interesting snippets here and there and however badly the film is made, it does paint a promising picture of how new technologies are helping us to manage, clean and re-use our water. It's a shame that such an important message was only able to get such a bad piece of film-making. Even more astonishing that it currently has 7.3 on imdb.

Bias, unsupported with facts, eco-fanatics opinions...and opposition opinions not permitted. The involvement of these high profile celebrities is suspect, too. They've invested in these schemes, so from a perspective, it's an infomercial for their personal wealth.

There's *an identical* "documentary", "A Thirsty World" (2012), that gives the same message. Here we are, eight years after that one, and not one prediction has come to fruition. Actually, some have proven to be the exact opposite of the doom and gloom forecast.

Some nice scenery, if you have a large screen, but otherwise, you can watch with no volume

A number of these technologies are very interesting and promising, but the notion that they're a panacea, that the technology is all there and all that lacks is political will, investment and societal change is frankly false. The energy intensity of many of these solutions is a key problem that was not covered, whilst the prohibitive cost of installing and maintaining others, particularly in developing countries, was not really mentioned. Furthermore, the biggest anthropogenic uses of water, e.g. for irrigation, provide some of the greatest opportunities to reduce water use, so that using marginal sources to reach the very high levels of purity required for drinking may not be required. But innovations in irrigation which dwarf other savings were hardly mentioned at all. It's great to see this massive issue in the popular mainstream, and I credit the creators with achieving that, but a more thoroughly researched sequel would be helpful in due course.