The Trick

Ignore the ultra negative reviews. This was bound to bring out the climate change deniers , flat earthers, anti vax brigade et al. So nutters aside, this an interesting although very dry recount of a hack, that produced a global storm about a world wide scientific conspiracy to falsify the evidence for global warming. The acting is solid but the story is kind of delivered in a very uninteresting way. Its worth a watch but if you think what you read on Facebook is the same as a peer reviewed scientific paper its probably not for you.

All the elements are there so this really comes down to bad direction. If the idea is to promote action on climate change, the producers and director have done nothing except muddle things with this mishmash convoluted story. I vaguely remember when the real story broke but didn't remember the details which may be why I didn't get this film. For more than 30 mins in I had no idea what the story was about because it was just a jumble of different scenes and characters and it just made no sense and most of it was not about the main character at all, just the peripheries of the story. The main character was relegated to 1 dimensional cartoon figure constantly crying and raising his hands to his head like "The Scream" but they used so much idiotic technobabble it was hard to understand exactly what he did to deserve persecution for most of the first third of the film. Too many scenes, too much melodrama, and too many cliches, and too little relation to the main character. The acting was great; but the story direction was awful. And of course at the end there's the speech where our hero gets vindicated. But, it's interesting on one point because it's a story about a supposed conspiracy to deceive that is blamed on another conspiracy against the conspiracy but in the end, the story is about nothing much at all. Well, that is, if there was some plot of importance, they lost it. (for the record, my comments are on the film, not the topic)

My Review - The Trick A BBC Production

My Rating 7/10

This new movie from The BBC is promoted as a thriller , sorry it's not a thriller at all .

Actually there's nothing thrilling at all about this movie the word Id use to describe it is chilling.

It's a true account of events in 2009 when Professor Phil Jones a renown Climatologist played by Jason Watkins found himself at the center of "an international media storm, and the victim of cyberterrorism" Jason Watkins is so convincing as the scientist who is suffering anxiety and not prepared to handle the media onslaught as he needs to be to defend his reputation.

"With time running out against an unseen enemy, The Trick looks at the potentially devastating consequences to humanity from climate change denial; how a media storm undermined public confidence in the science and how the concept of 'truth' took a back seat -- causing us to lose a decade of action," The film also features Victoria Hamilton, George MacKay, Jerome Flynn, Adrian Edmondson, Aneirin Hughes, Pooky Quesnel, Richard Elfyn and Rhashan Stone.

Jerome Flynn stars as Neil Wallis, a former News of the World executive and George MacKay as Sam Bowen, they have the daunting task of defending the reputation of Professor Jones and The University of East Anglia. "The film also charts the unjustified persecution of Phil Jones, his wife Ruth's support of her husband and the fight for the ultimate exoneration of himself and the science." The Trick is written by Owen Sheers and directed by Pip Broughton. Ben Irving serves as executive producer, with Adrian Bate as producer.

This film is well acted well directed with no tricks it just tells a story and an important story it's a little dull in places but so worth a look.

It's a truly fascinating story, the outcomes of what happened could quite literally have changed how the world thinks and acts.

A somewhat strange choice of material for a drama, but it made a change from cop shows, and it was nice to only have to invest 90 minutes of time in a one off drama, and not the usual six weeks.

I found it a little slow, half baked perhaps the right term, it was well acted for sure, nicely produced, but I don't think they made full use of the material, until the last fifteen minutes or so.

The impacts could have been incalculable, they were hardly mentioned.

As mentioned though the acting was great, Watkins and Hamilton never disappoint.

Worth watching, but be aware it's not the usual pulse racing drama that's generally on, 7/10.

While this story has merit, there is peer reviewed work out there that shows the really widespread stalling of addressing anthropomorphic aspect of climate change is not outright denial. The social science surveys and analysis show that the resistance is coming from pitching climate change solution as massive "economic justice" and wealth transfer. This especially after the massively botched Doha conference where language used in presentations and final memorandum made wealth redistribution a core aspect. In other words the exploitation of this issue and problem by certain groups who controlled the megaphone and wished to create counterproductive massive tax schemes and international bureaucracy to administer "redistribution" are the real problem in stalling progress.

This is why carbon capture and sequestration, which everyone knows will be the core solution, gets fob off by equally anti-science people in the climate change adovacy business -- because it doesn't fit with creation of giant tax bureaucracy. MIT has hundreds of people now working in their carbon capture and sequestrations project. And the top engineering universities in China, Japan and Europe all have major carbon capture programs. So unless you are going to say MIT, Princeton, Harvard, CalTech and Stanford are ant-science, don't dismiss carbon capture as the main technology that will solve this.

Denial of carbon capture is something the climate groups that want to create tax and wealth redistribution are incessantly doing. Just google: +princeton, "americans are unaware of carbon capture and sequestration technology, according to a new study"