12-30-2012, 11:12 AM
After we saw this movie, Lori was appalled by a review in the Mountain View Voice that only gave it 2.5 stars.
But how do you rate a movie like this? It's a documentary on the short side at 1 hr. 14 min., and the meat of the picture is time-lapse footage of several glaciers over a period of about three years. This footage itself probably plays out a total of two minutes.
There is human drama, for sure, as Orlawski comes up with the idea of doing all these time lapses, gets funding, then sets out to do it, in the process destroying his bad knees yet again. He has to work with engineers to build cameras that can do time-lapse in some of the most hostile environments on Earth, and figure out out to secure them and protect them from the elements and human tampering.
I watched this film as an Indiana native of 27 years. In other words, I tried to put myself in that demographic, which is largely Republican. My attitude through most of the film was, Yes, snow and ice melts; I've seen it happen enough times--and faster than one would think. And that is my biggest criticism of the movie. Through most of its length it just doesn't quite hammer through the scale of what's going on. It tries to, with footage. And I think it purposely steered away from a deluge of statistics out of fear this would turn the audience off. But this was precisely what I wanted and needed.
Not until the very late stages does it begin to answer questions I was having from the start. For instance, isn't it true that some glaciers are growing while others are shrinking? The answer is yes. But of, say, 150 glaciers, there's only 2 that are growing and maybe 35 that have vanished and over a hundred that are shrinking. (My numbers are likely off here, but it's close to this). I needed this question answered in the first few minutes of the movie, as well as the clarification made late that some of the seasonal checks early in the movie were from late summer into late winter -- in other words, shrinkage seen at times when one would expect rebuilding.
All in all, a monumental effort by a guy who cared more about capturing this visual evidence than he did about saving his knees, with stunning--if brief--footage, providing important scientific evidence but perhaps rushed to the screen before being fully polished.
Of the 20 people in the theater (all seemingly over 50), I suspect all of them entered believing in global warming and left still believing in it.
But how do you rate a movie like this? It's a documentary on the short side at 1 hr. 14 min., and the meat of the picture is time-lapse footage of several glaciers over a period of about three years. This footage itself probably plays out a total of two minutes.
There is human drama, for sure, as Orlawski comes up with the idea of doing all these time lapses, gets funding, then sets out to do it, in the process destroying his bad knees yet again. He has to work with engineers to build cameras that can do time-lapse in some of the most hostile environments on Earth, and figure out out to secure them and protect them from the elements and human tampering.
I watched this film as an Indiana native of 27 years. In other words, I tried to put myself in that demographic, which is largely Republican. My attitude through most of the film was, Yes, snow and ice melts; I've seen it happen enough times--and faster than one would think. And that is my biggest criticism of the movie. Through most of its length it just doesn't quite hammer through the scale of what's going on. It tries to, with footage. And I think it purposely steered away from a deluge of statistics out of fear this would turn the audience off. But this was precisely what I wanted and needed.
Not until the very late stages does it begin to answer questions I was having from the start. For instance, isn't it true that some glaciers are growing while others are shrinking? The answer is yes. But of, say, 150 glaciers, there's only 2 that are growing and maybe 35 that have vanished and over a hundred that are shrinking. (My numbers are likely off here, but it's close to this). I needed this question answered in the first few minutes of the movie, as well as the clarification made late that some of the seasonal checks early in the movie were from late summer into late winter -- in other words, shrinkage seen at times when one would expect rebuilding.
All in all, a monumental effort by a guy who cared more about capturing this visual evidence than he did about saving his knees, with stunning--if brief--footage, providing important scientific evidence but perhaps rushed to the screen before being fully polished.
Of the 20 people in the theater (all seemingly over 50), I suspect all of them entered believing in global warming and left still believing in it.