Davis Guggenheim's documentary is framed as a teaching film with motivational, even inspirational overtones; it's an expansion, with elegant visual aids, of the lecture Mr. Gore has given more than a thousand times all over the world. The film succeeds powerfully, even though it's short on practical solutions, makes some questionable statements of fact and, given Gore's current ambiguous position in public life, requires a tighter focus on the message than on the messenger.
The greatest value of "An Inconvenient Truth" is the cumulative force of its graphic images (glaciers melting, ice caps shrinking, myriad species in retreat from rising temperatures) and the gravity of its projections -- whole civilizations beset by changes of a biblical scale in the all-too-foreseeable future. Though many voices in government and industry continue to question the causal link between carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures, the film insists that the basic facts are no longer in dispute, and casts the call to action as less of a political issue than a moral one. Allowing catastrophe to overtake the world inherited by our children, Gore says, is "deeply unethical."
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