>>REVIEW
A CRUDE AWAKENING: THE OIL CRASH
DIRECTED BY Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack
Opens Friday, March 23
Uptown Screen
Over the past few years, filmmakers have thought of a fantastic number of ways in which the world will cease to exist and we are all going to meet our deaths. If it isn’t terrorism, global warming and natural disasters, then surely it’s vampires, aliens and boring office jobs.
In their documentary, A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash, Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack explore another of mankind’s failings – the world’s depleting oil supply. They repeat, ad nauseum, just how fast we are using up our oil reserves and their point is well-taken and worth thinking about. Unfortunately, the way they present the information is so disorganized and scatterbrained, it’s hard to stay focused on the fact that we’re all screwed.
The film opens unceremoniously and dives right into a barrage of statistics. Some of them definitely grab your attention – like, for example, that the world has been using more oil than it’s been producing for the past 30 years – but there’s just far too much to keep track of. To make matters worse, the co-directors don’t appear in the film and provide no narration, so the film is just a series of interview clips from a huge cast of characters.
A Crude Awakening is obviously well-researched and has an impressive number of experts lined up to help the cause, but is totally derailed by a lack of focus. The result of jumping from character to character and punctuating the whole thing with gloomy music is that the film ends up as fear-mongering than anything else. An unfortunate result for what should have been a truly thought-provoking documentary. |
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