User reviews

The Age of Stupid is a film about climate change, but it's not An Inconvenient Truth: Part Deux. Whereas the purpose of Al Gore's 2006 box office hit was to shake us from our slumber of self-comforting denial, Stupid is designed to take hold of our heads and smash our faces repeatedly into a table until we get up and do things differently.

It's indicative of how the debate has shifted over the last few years that Stupid does not spend time linking climate change with greenhouse gas emissions. The film states that less than 1% of climate scientists believe that there is any doubt about that link (even if this number rises to 60% when the general public are asked their opinion). The debate is over at long last, so the intention of Stupid is to use human stories to illustrate what a serious pickle our species has got itself into.

Stupid is mostly a documentary following the very different lives of six individuals and families around the world. The subjects include an oil geologist who lived in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, attempting to deal with the devastation of losing everything he owned to a natural disaster that was probably worsened by the burning of oil that he discovered.

Stupid is immaculately produced, carefully involving the audience in the on screen emotions, from sharing the heartbreak of the elderly French mountain guide witnessing a glacier recede, to the frustrated anger of the environmentalist whose wind farm had been blocked by a local NIMBY campaign.

Linking the documentaries together is a series of animated fact files from Passion Pictures (famous for the Gorrilaz) and an innovative fictional subplot starring Pete Postlethwaite. Postlethwaite plays the role of an archivist in 2055, responsible for curating a climate-proof store of human culture, history and scientific discovery, as well as two pickled specimens of every creature on Earth. At this stage, the planet is all-but uninhabitable and the archivist creates the film as a warning for whichever civilisation finally inherits the Earth.

Stupid focuses on the idea that it was our behaviour in the years up to 2015 that caused unstoppable climate change, culminating in the near- extinction of life by the middle of the century. Postelthwaite's character struggles to comprehend quite why we did nothing to stop our own suicide even when we knew that we could.

So is it a good film? Yes, it's bordering on the brilliant. At times it made me laugh, at other times it filled me with tears, and at one point I literally swung my fist in anger at the Daily Mail worshipping, house price obsessed, anti-wind lobbyists. Stupid isn't perfect; I felt that a couple of the documentary subjects distracted from the main issue of climate change by focusing on the evils of Big Oil. However, I would still challenge anyone who sees this film to leave the cinema without a fire in their belly.

Sadly, The Age of Stupid has not been seen by many people. It is an independent film which was funded entirely by small contributions from public investors. As such, it hasn't had the benefit of large distribution networks and, three weeks after release, is only now available at a few commendable cinemas. I shared the experience with 13 other people at the Panton St Odeon in London. Elsewhere, Horne and Corden's Lesbian Vampire Killers was probably playing to a full house. The Age of Stupid sounds like quite an apt title to me.

An appropriate title for a documentary in the genre of An Inconvenient Truth, minus the robot like Al Gore. Instead the narrator is Pete Postlethwaite, a dryly funny British actor who leads us through our insane self destruction. It is 2055, and Pete watches news clips of the past, in which the human race did little to prevent climate change. Through flashbacks to teal events, such as Hurricane Katrina, with with an interview with a survivor who stayed to help, in spite of the fact that he lost everything, Al Duvernay, and others show the real cost of our stupidity.

London is under water and Sydney is on fire; Las Vegas is a barren wasteland, and the Amazon rain forest is gone. We have almost completely destroyed the planet.

Piers Guy tries to make a difference by developing wind farms, a clean and renewable energy source. He battles residents of an English town who complain that the turbines will spoil their landscape. Not in my backyard, as the saying goes. It is our selfishness that will ultimately wipe us out.

Other people from around the world are interviewed who still haven't yet given up; but by the end of the film I personally believe that we are at a point of no return. We just cannot continue to add to a world population of over seven billion and survive. Nevertheless, The Age of Stupid is a fine effort.

The Age Of Stupid has just opened on 78 screens across the UK - a remarkable feat for a genre-defying independent feature made on a shoe string, funded by ordinary households and distributed with a launch budget of just £130,000. To put this in perspective, An Inconvenient Truth opened in 2006 on just 18 screens and a typical UK-wide release spends around £650,000 telling people to go and see their film.

So why all the fuss?

Four years ago McLibel director Fanny Amstrong and producer Lizzie Gillett set about making a documentary called (at the time) Crude, which charted the ugly side of the oil industry. Fast forward to 2009 and the project has finally emerged as a surprisingly human and touching call-to-arms about climate change called Age Of Stupid.

The film opens in 2055 with Pete Postlethwaite, archivist of a ruined earth, looking back at images of the present day, trying to answer the question of why humanity didn't save itself when it had the chance. Archival news material and animated sequences are used to provide background and context, but the focus is on documentary stories of real people facing the effects of our hunger for fossil fuels.

As a result, the film does not labour under the burden of attempting to sway the undecided through facts and figures - though it's possible that even Sarah Palin herself could not fail to be affected by the story of Fernand Pareau, an octogenarian French mountain guide, showing us the glacier he loves as it withers away before his eyes.

As we explore the ageing archivist's question, we encounter "not in my back yard" anti-wind farm protesters, committed climate change activists and an entrepreneur who dreams of ending poverty by starting India's third budget airline. Blame is ultimately laid at the feet of our culture of consumerism, and the implication is that profound social changes will be required to survive the present age - poignantly exemplified in a sequence involving Alvin DuVernay, a hurricane Katrina survivor who, having lost all of his possessions, philosophically reflects on what it took for him to realise what was actually important to him.

At the time of writing, around half of the IMDb votes have given the film a rating of 9 or 10 and around a quarter have given it rating of 1. This polarisation is not about artistic merit, but between those for whom the film has deeply resonated and those who find it confronting and uncomfortable.

I've read some complaints about the film being preachy, and it is certainly true that there is forceful criticism of – say – Shell's operations in the Niger delta and the Iraq war. There is no attempt to present any positive outcome of these interventions, but then I'm not expecting a rush of filmmakers wanting to fill this particular gap in the market.

In general the voices of dissent come from the mouths of those directly affected, and indeed it is the human face of these stories that is one of the film's engaging strengths. History's witness is not always the great orator we want it to be, but over 90 minutes the film manages to maintain a good pace and link the various threads together.

The Age Of Stupid has dispensed with convention in a multitude of ways, not the least of which is the way it has forced its way onto our screens, seemingly through sheer force of will alone. Ultimately the merit of the film is not about the quality of editing or its performances, but its transformational potential. I genuinely think that many viewers will leave the cinema and, like Alvin DuVernay, start to question the world which surrounds them, and it is this quality which makes The Age Of Stupid a truly remarkable film.

Every single economy, developed, developing, underdeveloped, Marxist, socialist, social welfare, mixed or full market depends on growth. Increasing population either through reproduction or immigration is the most destructive thing for the planet. That does mean more carbon, more plastic, more pollutants in general, more pavement, more disease transmission -- you name it.

The single best solution for global warming and stress on the planet in general is well understood: Higher level so education for poor women -- specially in the underdeveloped world. the more educated a woman is the longer she differs first pregnancy and the less kids she has.

This film does not address the core issues at all but is a whining, self righteous preaching to the choir so people spend a few pounds, euros or dollars to see it feel like they did something -- when they did NOTHING. The theater I saw this at in the UK was AIR CONDITIONED

Thank The Heavens!! If films like this and al gore are the force behind committing economic suicide then rest assured my follow friends who posses commonsense....we are safe for now! What a self serving holy then thou piece of nonsense this film is. It seeks only to provoke emotion and all commonsense is regarded as being evil earth hating thoughts. You may think this film will only serve to excite the disciples of global warming, but in fact it does much more.....It proves (to the independent thinker) how far the religion of global warming has come, this movie will scare most into avoiding the cult not joining it!!!

The film contrasts a bleak future that we are heading towards with the current way people carry on as usual. The archivist (Pete Postlethwaite) looks after the best of the planets museum exhibits, and looks back from the year 2055 at how we got there. He observes a group in Bedfordshire stopping a potential wind farm from getting through planning, an entrepreneur in India starting a low cost airline, a woman surviving in Nigeria torn by Shell's oil extraction, children exiled from Iraq and a man retired from the oil industry living in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. The scenarios show how complicated it can be to make a difference, but that its something we need, and must, do.

The subject of climate change is often covered but rarely brought to the big screen. This ambitious low budget project is well worth viewing because it will make you think just that little more about how we're draining resources on earth.

It's a neat idea. The late and much missed Pete Postlethwaite is an archivist who spends the entire film touching a computer screen showing us reasons why the planet ended up in such a desolate state in 2055.

Interlaced with six separate documentary stories covering various aspects of climate change are snippets of news recordings, social commentary and animation hybrid. It all works rather well, your interest is kept high and the stories all work the grey matter into overdrive. All held together by Postlethwaite who in reality has very little to do but does it rather well nonetheless.

Most certainly worth a watch and just may well tempt you to try reduce your carbon emission. A good effort all round.

As a scientist (biochemist) almost every day I feel deep pain in my heart when the news shows frustrating human impact on the nature. Maybe 10 years pass since I joined Greenpeace site, but political instability in my country (Serbia) didn't let me to join the Greenpeace world protests, but I plan to participate in the future. The plot of this movie is more than realistic, all scientific evidences predicts very black future if global emission of greenhouse gases doesn't rapidly decrease until 2015. So, plotted 2055. tower whit the Archivist wouldn't be SF... The film have strong green message, and I am 100% sure that I'll watch again and recommend the film to my friends.

A documentary starring Pete Postlethwaite as an archivist in the future who reflects back on how we sleepwalked into a climate change disaster. Made in 2009 I think.

Obviously, a cautionary documentary with a purpose, Postlethwaite delivers a suitably sincere and grave performance.

It is an interesting piece sharing real life stories from a time when climate change was still being debated. It remains somewhat relevant today as too little has really changed in the last 12 years, but it has dated a bit.

Overall, not as impactful now as it could have been then and a little dated.

The Age of Stupid (NR, 1:26) — Borderline, bargain basement, original, OSIT cynics

I use the "Borderline" category for movies that can be viewed from one angle as SF&F but from another as realistic (such as "Was it a dream or not?" puzzlers). This one qualifies because the framing device is a look backward from the 2055 vantage point of a post- apocalyptic archivist (Pete Postlethwaite), one of the last human survivors of the global- warming catastrophe, but the guts of the movie comprises modern-day video clips that he's sadly reviewing, wondering how people ever let the planet go to hell without even trying to stop it.

So, if it's science fiction, it's lots more science than fiction, and therein lies the film's primary problem. It should be gripping and involving, but it doesn't follow even an unconventional story line. Instead it skips here and there around the globe, its conventional graphics and news footage (a la An Inconvenient Truth) playing 2nd fiddle to documentary interviews with 6 actual denizens of 2008:  • Jamila and Adnan Bayyoud, Iraqi child refugees now living in Syria, hoping for a chance to kill Americans  • Alvin DuVernay, a Shell Oil geologist who retired about a year after Hurricane Katrina wiped out his home in New Orleans  • Piers Guy, a British wind-turbine installer fighting NIMBYism  • Layefa Malini, a Nigerian woman aspiring to be a doctor to help people like those in her destitute village, just downstream of another Shell Oil operation  • Fernand Pereau, an elderly Alpine guide who recalls, from the bottom of a 150-metre ladder, that in his youth there was no ladder, because the glacier filled the valley to the top  • Jeh Wadia, Indian entrepreneur, who wants to bring 1-rupee airline fares to the masses

All of these people see bits and pieces of the puzzle, but their efforts to solve it are either ineffective, thwarted, missing altogether, or willfully blind about it. There's a moral here, but it's not exemplified by any of the interviewees. And, of course, since the film is almost entirely talking heads, it falls completely flat as drama.

The movie speaks of global climate change as if it were a single problem in and of itself, completely ignoring the effects of overpopulation. For example, the good-intentioned Guys are trying diligently to reduce their carbon footprint, but they apparently have 4 kids, and the question of whether this is commensurate with responsible planetary stewardship is never even whispered.

I'm glad I saw this movie, but I feel obliged to review it according to the way it was presented, as SF. As dystopias go, it's not anywhere close to being in the same league as The Matrix, let alone such exemplary cautionary tales as 1984 and Brave New World. It needs to preach to more than just the choir, but it's not at all compelling for anyone who's not already a true believer.

... and also thanks to the ratings and comments on the message board. (i want to point out that there was a lot more negative ratings/comments about this movie when i first reviewed it)

the film shows multiple stories which cover different aspects of how people contribute climate change and how they are affected in return. the nice thing is that it isn't a emotionally distanced documentary that just shows the results in a rather cold manner but also shows motivations of people and parts of their personal life.

a similar assumption to the one being made at the end of "diary of the dead" is being made in this movie: maybe humanity isn't worth saving. this thought is underlined by examples of ignorant and egotistical people.

some here say the movie is preachy - i think it is not preachy enough. you can't break the brainwashing of stupidity outlets like fox news with just showing facts. there should be texts saying "YOU are killing people right now". well, maybe not quite as harsh but still... the majority of the people need a metaphorical slap in the face to wake them up.

which brings me to the way in which this movie has changed my thoughts (and behavior). while watching these idiots protest a wind farm because their precious "view" might be destroyed, something finally clicked. i always knew that the majority of people are like that but the thing is - there is no appealing to them. their comfort is more important than anything else. and because of that, humanity truly deserves to perish. i've always tried to help and my biggest goal in life was to somehow improve life for people - but i now realize that they don't deserve it.

This program does not help planet earth, we as a race are going to fix problem. "all these trees getting in they way". Plus hotter means no need for holiday. give money to help the poor equils setting up palm oil production problems solved. then people get fat on palm oil products, tax the fat people, fat people get depressed = promote pain killers, promote anti-depresants, make more money. back to program , I thought the french mountain climbing was interesting character and i learned some french. It used to all be about ozone layer caused by fridges releasing gas no it's cow's whats next?

Until I had seen this film I had not realised that propaganda could be all the more painful when it supports one's own cause. I compare it to the experience of listening to a fool who attempts to argue on behalf of an issue one dearly believes in and in the process makes every basic error that allows the utter destruction of an otherwise sensible point of view. I now believe that there is no place for media manipulators, actors or directors in the global warming debate. If ever the argument is to be won it must be by scientists restricted to fact. This film almost swayed me to the opposite pov than was intended, so obvious was its attempt at emotional manipulation and confusion of reality with fiction. So sad considering the gravity of the situation that confronts mankind and the weight of evidence that man is indeed the cause of climate disruption.

Although I understand and comprehend the role that Al Gore's movie played in the USA, Gore's work is perhaps best seen as a US phenomenon. It is true that he has been very important in the broader context - not the least due to his primary audience (USA, that is) being responsible for such staggering volumes of material/energy consumption on this planet - but his movie was never really that mental quantum leap on the other side of the pond - at least not here in Sweden. I guess it's related to education: a foul combination of conspiracists-out-of-work and lobbyists-very-much-at-work put the USA somewhat behind the rest of the world, as reflected in the non-signing of the Kyoto protocol. As a business owner, I run an online store here in Sweden through which I sell consumer products. The Age of Stupid hasn't stopped me, but it has put it all - and I mean ALL - in a totally new perspective. I did cry when E.T. flew home in his spaceship - I was 14 at the time - so The Age of Stupid is the second movie ever that has made me cry. We live in a world where economic growth, employment and profits somehow are seen as having a higher priority than planetary/human survival. Somehow, we (at least me) live under the pretext that the human spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation would somehow wither away if we were to reduce, or even stabilize, our planetary load. Furthermore, we have a hard time translating happiness, and its increase, into something that doesn't has to do with consumerism. The Age of Stupid is a documentary that not only made me vegetarian, but it has also fundamentally changed the way I do business. My e-store now contains a consumption warning, explicitly asking my would-be customers NOT to shop - or at least restrict their spending as much as possible. I encourage other business owners to do the same - which of course is a futile and even comical thing to do for those who hasn't seen this film. So make sure as many people as possible get the chance to watch it. Ask your local cinema to put it up, order a DVD and hold private screenings.

Its a documentary presented in a fresh, and engaging way. A lone archivist in the future, putting together a message of media clips from 2009, to be broadcast into space as a warning.

It could have had many titles other than The Age Of Stupid. Maybe?

The Age Of 95% of scientists were stupid The Age Of we knew but did not care The Age Of entitled consumerism The Age Of our grandchildren will probably sort it The Age Of the self The Age Of ....... ?

The vignettes of individual circumstances from around the world were interesting and contrasting. One that stuck in my mind was the young African aspiring doctor, selling plastic bottles of diesel to scrape a daily living. Juxtaposed with an elderly English upper class NIMBY lady, gleefully smiling after a planning committee had stopped a wind farm of 9 turbines in a local disused WW2 airfield.

A decent watch, but only if you are concerned?

Excellent film - a real wake-up call to all of us to think about the impact our lifestyles have on the environment, and the hypocrisy of the West in having enjoyed the lifestyles we have whilst dictating to those in countries like India and Africa that they should not be allowed to aspire to the same things.

As the contrasting points of view about the film on this site show...it certainly encourages debate, which can only be a good thing. It inspired me to want be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem, which is about as much as campaigning filmmaker can hope to achieve, isn't it?

The film doesn't use statistics or predictions to show the affects and causes of climate change, we're at the stage where it can just honestly show peoples' stories and the increasingly facile dilemmas of modern life to convey how we're walking into serious problems.

It is really powerful, it's one of those rare moments where after the film ends you just stay silently frozen to your seat in awe. The lush graphics, the excellent acting by Pete and the reality of the stories makes this film, as cliché as it is, totally unmissable.

Those who don't like this film I can only conclude are just scared, scared that if they're wrong they will be catastrophically wrong and live in such a way selfish way in which they can only feel threatened by the change needed to be more climate considerate in their lives.

What a magnificent documentary, and 10 years later, nothing has changed, quite the contrary, we are increasingly consumerist, inhuman and materialistic... The real characters Layefa Malini and the lifeguard touched me, and the children cut me to the heart, the naivete, and responsibility so young, the game representing the guild, cruel and treacherous... Guy Piers' struggle for wind energy, a solitary struggle, touched me, and the rancidity I took from the despicable Indian businessman Jeh Wadia... Beautiful ...

In a polarized world we live in, where greed became not only acceptable, but a virtue, this movie will not make any difference.The egotism and selfishness of our culture will be the end of us as species. Well, we all get what we deserve. Capitalism as destructive, seducing force, doesn't see any need to curb its lunacy. It must grow bigger and fatter, till explodes in our faces, and takes our cowardly world with it.And we all knew it might happen... But, we liked our trinkets and gadgets, our comforts and little pleasures, that became necessary to forget the out of control expanding of our work loads and demands. So, this is the gate in the near frightening future. I hope we all enjoy it.