Brave Blue World

I am a chemist, engineer, and water resource scientist. While I'm always happy to see a documentary raise awareness of water availability/quality issues, this documentary has a number of issues of its own.

First of all, the so-called 'solutions' being offered by its sprawling list of do-gooder celebrities are not innovative, novel, or sustainable. They're well-proven technologies putting temporary band-aids on deep sociopolitical problems for the sake of making their celebrity sponsors feel good.

Second, the film has a number of corporate sponsors. As a result, it failed to touch on some very real issues with the way we currently treat water. For example, Reverse Osmosis is disgustingly inefficient. It wastes about half the water it treats. It also absolute munches through power, and the waste stream from RO is a concentrated pollutant being shot back into the environment. But Suez, one of the sponsors, is a major player in RO and membrane desalination. So that got glossed over.

Third, it perpetuates the myth of a straight-up bogus technology. Humidity-condensers are not viable products. They've been debunked over and over and over again. The thermodynamics of converting whatever small amount of moisture is in the air to drinking water are enormous. And other than that lone instance of local innovation, the rest of the documentary reeks of western-savior complex.

This documentary is mental candy. Replaces real nutrition, and is bad for your teeth (from all the clenching).

This film tells us about inovative ways of conserving water, conjuring water where there is none and dealing with it once it becames waste.

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

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.

The film is ok. The technologies shown are interesting and inspire some hope in the survival of the humanity, but the simplest and maybe the most important solution was not even mentioned. Ok, home filters of the "grey" water waste can save several thousand liters of water per month, but let's have a look at another example. The production cycle of just one liter of milk requires around a thousand liters of water; one burger patty requires several thousands liters. Just by switching to an oat or soy milk and ditching beef (and preferably all the meat) you will save enormous amounts of water, hundreds of thousands liters per year just in your household. We need to think globally. Water is used not only in our taps, but for all the products which we buy and we eat.