Under the Radar DVD of the Week: ‘The Age of Stupid’
This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is:
“The Age of Stupid”
As we twiddle our thumbs and continue a contentious debate over climate change and global warming, a new DVD out Tuesday presents us with a bleak picture of the price of doing nothing now. “The Age of Stupid” is an ambitious documentary-drama-animation hybrid that’s set on a barren, devastated Earth in 2055 and asks the question, “Why didn’t we stop climate change when we still had the chance?”
Starring British actor Pete Postlethwaite (“The Usual Suspects”) as the lone keeper of “The Global Archive,” a vast storage facility protecting all of humanity’s collective achievements, the film uses footage of real people in the years leading up to 2015 before runaway climate change took place.
The archivist sorts through an array of news clips, scientific data and interviews – all issuing dire warnings of the devastating effects of rampant consumption – in an effort to work out why we didn’t change our wasteful and profligate ways.
In the process, he focuses on various prophetic environmental scenarios: a woman barely surviving in a Nigeria depleted by a multinational’s oil extraction; an entrepreneur in India starting a low-cost airline; children exiled from Iraq; a Bedfordshire group blocking a proposed wind farm; a retired oil executive living in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. Each shows how tangled the debate and how difficult it is to make a difference in the ongoing arguments over climate change.
“The Age of Stupid” is not rated and runs 92 minutes. A second disc includes extras, such as a 50-minute making-of documentary, extended interviews and commentary, deleted scenes, trailers and eight short climate films. It’s being released by the New Video Group.
- Dennis King