The title is the name applied
to the present by the film's craggy-faced chorus, a man called The Archivist, played by Pete Postlethwaite. A voice of doom speaking to us from the year 2055, he is the curator of the Global Archive, a collection, based in an ice-free Arctic, of artefacts that chart the history of an extinct species: homo sapiens.
On a touch-screen he conjures reminders of the time, half a century before, when we had a chance to do something and didn't: "We had an unspoken collective pact to pretend that climate change wasn't happening, that as long as we ignored it hard enough, it wouldn't be true."
Drawing on news and documentary snippets from the existing record, the film interleaves several sobering stories of its own: a smug bully of an Indian entrepreneur starting a budget airline with fares as low as five cents; an aged French mountain guide who has watched the glaciers of Chamonix retreat; the twittish residents of a Bedfordshire village resisting the building of a wind farm because it's going to obliterate the view ("We're not against wind energy," they explain, "just inappropriate wind energy.").
There is no denying the passion of director Armstrong, whose
McLibel
documented the David-and-Goliath struggle between fast-food giant McDonald's and environmental activists Dave Marsh and Helen Steel. But the film loses focus at times, in particular in its concentration on small domestic action. Keeping chooks and cycling to work is great, but it has a palliative effect on the necessary sense of urgency about what one scientist calls "the greatest task humanity has ever faced". As the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December approaches, the figures are stark: if we don't stabilise carbon emissions within six years and cut them by 80 per cent by 2050, we will be the first species to knowingly exterminate itself.
Peter Calder
Director:
Franny Armstrong
Running time:
89 mins
Rating:
M (offensive language)
