Allison Davies
The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.
Catherina
If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.
Darin
One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.
vernetto
most of the speakers are highly qualified and very scholar, but the narrative around Lucy is very naif: they describe life in 2080 as technologically very similar to the present (gas-powered cars, internet, power grid...)... also, the director seems to believe that USA is sort of a "leading nation" with a duty to guide the rest of humanity out of this ecological predicament, while in reality USA is the nation who does the most to CREATE this predicament in the first place, with their absurd lifestyle and the aggressiveness of its corporation.... don't forget that the largest polluting entity on the planet is the USA army - but this is not even mentioned in the movie. The narrator also mentions people coming from "failed countries" as a big security threat (to Americans... the rest of the world doesn't really matter...), while forgetting to mention that USA itself is mostly responsible -with direct or indirect military, political or economical attacks - for the "failure" of these states. So on the whole this movie told me little I didn't already know (I have read all Jared Diamond books, they are excellent) and only annoyed me for its faith in Governments and americocentricity.
submale320
This show was great. In a very short time has proved humans with a advanced brain, stand upright, have thumbs and can speak has become the perfect destroying machine. Humans destroy everything they come in contact with. The best thing to happen to this plant is for the entire human species to be destroyed, this film was great as it shows mankind is no good for this planet. The world is 4.5 billion years old, if there is a God, why would he wait so long to put humans on the planet. Look what mankind has done in less then 300 years, what a joke, mankind was the worst thing to ever happen to earth. If there is a God, what a disappointment mankind must be to him, destroying his planet and having no regard what so ever for nature or the millions of creatures on this planet. Anyone who is in disagreement with this show and does not see what humans have done to this once so beautiful planet is in a fog as mankind deserves whatever ever nature throws at humans, we are all guilty of destroying this beautiful planet and it is all GREED driven.
John
After seeing this documentary I was left with one single question. If there is a single most important cause for this outcome, what would it be. There is only one understanding this reasonably rational human being can come to. As Lucy states, the human race is collapsing under its own weight. There are just to many of us for this "Blue Marble", we live on to support with out our destroying our home in order to feed, cloth, shelter, etc., such huge numbers.What a sad commentary on our inability to say "NO", to procreation. I, myself, have chosen to not do so. Unfortunately, it might take something like ninety-nine out of a hundred to do the same in 1980, to make a difference by 2015. 2015, being the step over the edge into the abyss year, or close to it, from which this earth will not be able to recover for centuries. We humans are killing the very planet that gave us life in the first place.How sad, when a self aware, sentient, god seeking being, is wondering if a single strand of RNA might be our salvation. Salvation for the human species being six billion dead. But would we just start all over again.
jhuni_x
Global warming, flooding, droughts, natural disasters, diseases, over-population, refugees, peak oil, resource wars, why not throw all of these things together centered around a single character and then conclude the movie by saying that we need to create a green and environmental future?This film does not establish a clear relation between each of these problems, it just jumps from one from issue to another, and it can be quite confusing along the way. Besides that, things are centered far too much on America and the life of this fictional character: Lucy. I don't think they mention Africa, South America, The Middle East, or Australia, much or at all. They talk about China and India a little: apparently they declared a resource war against one another, however, they don't go into it that much after that.In addition to this, there have been oil shortages in the world before. See {The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006)}. People would import lots of bicycles as the price of gasoline for cars goes up, they would start growing their own food as the price of food goes up, and so on. People wouldn't be senselessly driving in their cars to get super-expensive gas as is implied here. They over-dramatize every issue to a 'worst case scenario', especially the issue of peak oil.How exactly did the population go to 9 billion and then down to 2.7 billion and where exactly were these population changes distributed? In order to support a larger population, such as one that has 9 billion people, you would undoubtedly need advances in agriculture and architecture, so that bigger buildings can be created and so that more food can be produced. Besides that there are things which are limiting factors to the expanse of the population, such as the birth control programs in China and AIDS in Africa.Moving on, was there any good reason that those sea-barriers had to fail? I think they would have made all sorts of precautions to assure that they would work correctly, and they would predict the event before hand so that they could drop the sea-barriers without resistance. Furthermore, if they wanted to construct a modern green city, they most certainly wouldn't do it around New York, when New York is immediately threatened by the floods and diseases. Instead, they would most certainly create the city around Siberia or Canada, because in this future those areas would become warmer and more habitable, so they would make for an ideal place to create a "beacon of hope" for this post-apocalyptic society.One thing that was really disturbing is the communications breakdown, and the idea that the scientific breakthroughs could be lost. One of the people interviewed for this show said "if it is some electronic based thing it could all be lost" considering modern storage capacities, you can store so much data that there is little threat to the ability to successfully store it. Sure a nuclear apocalypse, or a massive raise in the Earth's sea-levels could seriously threaten life and civilization as we know it, however, I do not think it poses much of any threat to digital data or our communications systems.We could easily store all of our scientific breakthroughs/literature/videos/software on a couple of hard-drives and put them in spacecrafts/satellites that would be completely impervious to all Earthly matters, in addition to this these spacecrafts could send radio waves down to Earth. This could form the basis of a communication system used to reconstruct human society after such an apocalyptic event as the one this film depicts.In conclusion, this movie recommends that people change their habits immediately in order to go green, to get solar panels, and wind power. These are things we have probably already heard many times before so this ending segment probably won't be interesting to most people. They actually pose no real solutions to most of the issues presented in this film: natural disasters, over-population, peak oil etc.
