"An Inconvenient Truth"

I found Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, to be a very interesting straightforward presentation of global warming in relation to the world today. In last week's short film that I watched by Eric Faden, Tracking Theory, the message was difficult to interpret at first. I was actually forced to watch the movie a couple of times to fully comprehend the message he was trying to convey to the viewer. This was not the case with An Inconvenient Truth. After watching it once, I felt that I had a nice grasp on the topic of global warming and understanding of its many implications.

I had never seen An Inconvenient Truth before, so I had no idea what to expect, other than Al Gore talking about the issue of global warming, which I already knew was very important to him. As the documentary began, I was relieved to discover that the whole movie was not just Gore standing at a podium showing slides of images and facts relating to global warming. To me, that would have been extremely boring. Instead, the documentary was able to draw in the audience by showing Gore outside of the public speaking environment. It did show Gore delivering his infamous global warming slideshow presentation to large groups of people around the world, but that was not the whole movie. There were many scenes with Gore away from the crowds of people discussing this issue in a manner that created a more intimate environment, where the audience could feel like he was talking directly to them. This style of presentation was not present in Eric Faden's Tracking Theory. There was not that same sense of intimacy with the narrator or insight into the narrator's commitment to the message in this movie as there was in An Inconvenient Truth. In Tracking Theory, it seemed as if the film was trying to trick the viewer the entire time, whereas in An Inconvenient Truth, the movie revolved around uncovering and discussing the hard facts of global warming. Tracking Theory was done very artistically, while An Inconvenient Truth was one hundred percent committed to explaining the facts of global warming to the world in a way that would inspire people to change. Although the styles used in the making of these two documentaries were clearly different, they were both successful in the presentation of their arguments. Both of these films caused their viewers to continue thinking after the film stopped rolling.