Are We Stupid?

“We could have saved ourselves, but we didn’t.”

 This sentence represents the main theme of the movie very well. Video clips that watched by the archivist are reflections of us, people in the early of 21th century. This documentary film make us remind how we are intensifying the problems of climate change, and our action in front of those horrible consequences of what we did. It also suggest us to ask ourselves that why we are staying doing nothing in the middle of

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Stories in a frame

 The first thing that I was interested about this film is its expressive technique. This film, interestingly differing from most of documentaries which deliver information directly, is consist of two parts. In the fictional part, the world is ravaged by catastrophic climate change. Therefore the archivist of the archive which is saving the all kind of knowledge of humanity, review the records from back, the time when we could stop the catastrophe. The other part, the factual part is those records, the videos of six stories. This construction came fresh to me. It totally breaks the unwritten law of documentaries and makes viewers get more interested and tend to concentrate more on the film. Furthermore, I can say that it uses ethos and also pathos since this concept stimulate reader’s senses of guilt by showing the abysmal future caused by the mankind of present. This seems like a rahmennovelle, or frame-story, but it sure is a whole new approach when it comes to a documentary. Thus I want to praise a lot this film in the side of organization.

 However its message, on the other hand, was not persuasive enough with regarding to logos. Right after saying this, the archivist subsequently says,

“It’s amazing. What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off?”

 And this movie generally seems that blaming the science technology. Like in case of Al Duvernay, it sounds like the movie is saying that the oil industry is bad itself. But I have a doubt about that we are really doing nothing and just shrugging off and it’s really the technology which should be blamed.Many people thinks that we should stop developing technologies or at least we should slow down it in order to save the environment(like this). Though, I think that, oppositely, to develop the technology is better for saving the environment. I’m not saying that we had better not care about environmental issues. The point is that comparing the two cases, to develop and not to develop, the environment of the former case would be better.

Wind, Sunlight, Water, Bio

 There are of course some bases of this argument. First, now the technology is being developed more eco-friendly. As seen in the video above, in the near future, the amount of pollution that can be reduced by the technology might be bigger than that caused by the technology. This is the point. Several Alternative energies, such as sunlight energy, bio energy, wave energy, hydrogen energy, wind energy, are the epitomes of it. 

No good, no bad

 Second, the science or the technology cannot be blamed because of the value neutrality. The technology itself cannot be determined as good or bad, but it is only when it’s used that we can make a value judgment. We don’t blame a gun when a murder shoot people but we blame him. It’s just a same logic.

 According to the reasons I wrote above, I finally reached at this conclusion. It’s not true that we doing nothing but awareness of common people are somehow wrong. So the only way to make the situation better even a bit, is to be cognizant of the importance of the problems and regulate and control the people who use the technology not the technology itself.