Hot Take: An educational, timely and a little bit ominous (Thank you, Mr. Trump) journey back to climate change with Al Gore and graphs. Lots and lots of graphs!

I feel your reaction to An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power will be impacted by how much you care about climate change or if you believe in it at all. I’m not sure how you could sit in a theater for 2 hours (4 if you saw the first movie) and see all of the evidence presented and dismiss what you can see right in front of you. Then again, you might think Al Gore isn’t being honest, the graphs are manipulated or made up and the whole thing is propaganda. It was really cold last winter so how could there be global warming, right?

My only knock on An Inconvenient Sequel is that it’s more of the same message of the original attempt to educate the world on how serious climate change is and how important clean energy and a more conscientious government would be to staving off the effects of our poor man made decisions that speed up the global warming process. There’s really not much happening that you couldn’t learn from watching the original other than to see that the Gore movement has had a very positive impact on the fight against climate change but also has a very, very long way to go and suffered a pretty big punch to the face with the arrival of the Trump administration to the White House.

If you watched the first film 10 years ago and aren’t really that concerned with an update on what progress has been made, An Inconvenient Sequel will just feel like a recycled message that’s preaching to the choir. If you saw the original and thought it was propaganda, there’s not a new approach that’ll somehow win you over here. If you sat it out the first time, you might want to take a look at what Mr. Gore has to say about the environmental issues that are facing our world. He’s only asking for 99 minutes of your time.

“Spoiler Free” Pros

  • Pretty (Effective) Graphs
    There’s a lot of data presented in An Inconvenient Sequel. This is done most effectively by graphs presented by Al Gore during various speeches. The graphs really bring home the message and show some startling findings. Plus, they’re pretty and I love pretty graphs.

“Spoiler Free” Cons

  • Back to the Future II
    One thing that becomes rather cumbersome about An Inconvenient Sequel is the way the timeline becomes very jumbled as the 10 years since An Inconvenient Truth are covered in such a way that the story bounces from one year to the next in a non-linear fashion. It’s hard to keep track of what year it is and if the current discussion happened recently or 7 years ago. Not that it matters much but it becomes a little bit of a headache.

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