- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2009
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Non-Fiction
- Director:
- Outstanding Performances:
- None
- Premiss:
- Fifty-four country depiction of how Earth’s problems are all interlinked.
- Themes:
- Alienation
- Art
- Corporate Power
- Destiny
- Emotional repression
- Evolution
- God
- Identity
- Individualism
- Loneliness
- Materialism
- Narcissism
- Nature
- Personal
- Political
- Republicanism
- Sadomasochism
- Schizophrenia
- Science
- Social class
- Snobbery
- Solipsism
- The State
- White culture
- White guilt
- White supremacy
- Similar to:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Inconvenient Truth
- Koyaanisqatsi
- Story of Mankind
- Review Format:
- DVD
Global Warning
Whose Planet is it Anyway?
Summary: Caucasians Running-Away from the Problems They Cause.
White person’s film that refuses to admit that it is made from a Western perspective (rather than the global one it unsuccessfully feigns) despite frequent claims that homo sapiens are as wise as the name Whites have given them.
Whites have raped and despoiled the Earth for centuries, as a direct result of the Industrial Revolution, to provide themselves with unprecedented material comforts. This has enabled them to pretend that they are no longer engaged in an inter-dependent relationship with other species and People of Color (POC), such that they are destroying their own environment while simultaneously denying that that is precisely what they are doing. Laziness has decided Whites along the path of a fundamental separation from Nature and, thus, a fundamental misunderstanding of the very Nature Whites, like everyone else, depend on for continued life. Even so, this movie uses the words “Our”, “Us” and “We” as if it were discussing all humans rather than just Caucasians.
Whites do not wish to relinquish their material comforts and so must deny that they possess self-destructive ways to evade the inevitable guilt for the damage they do, as well as to avoid the need to return to a more sustainable, more physically-demanding way of life. Thus divorced from reality, Whites refuse to care about the suffering of others when it comes to the decline in such things as water, oil, coal and gas supplies - until these declines personally-affect them; hence, the self-indulgent and frightened nature of this White documentary now that Whites - the people Whites think of as being the only important ones - are beginning to experience difficulties. Whites are not taught to see the bigger picture by their failed educational systems, so they do not know how.
This movie is unwilling to acknowledge that the development of non-White countries makes Whites resent the fact that their lifestyle is under threat from the very developments Whites have enjoyed for centuries. Also, that so-called “Developed” and “Developing” nations are not as developed as they believe because their development comes at a cost to the environment that can only be resolved if:
- The developments initiated by Whites are renounced in favor of a return to a simpler way of living;
- there is a global war to rid the world of “excess” populations in a life-or-death struggle over available natural resources; or,
- Whites commit mass suicide.
The implied critique of capitalism does not resolve the allegedly-Earth-centered view the film takes when its view is really Caucasocentric. Because White greed is the basic cause of the problems outlined here, one wonders why this fact is not foregrounded, but that would be a honest reflection of which Whites have shown themselves to be continually-unable in their slothful need to cling to the past. Living off the surpluses created by capital accumulation has now become living off the fons et origo of those surpluses; leaving nothing of value left to live on.
As the film evades Whites as a causative agent in the morass allegedly-explored, it also evades remedies. The film-makers know that solutions mean Whites using their massive military expenditures to make sure that Whites will be the last to die - much like the first-class passengers on the Titanic. Any solutions will inevitably be White ones: Everyone else must stop industrializing to allow Whites to exploit what resources remain.
Whites have not traditionally cared about the suffering they have caused others - or themselves - so it is hard to see them as the solution to the problems they create that this film does. One has only to watch the attached Le Making Of to see the lack of basic human passion and joie de vivre among the Whites who made it to see the source of the problems it pretends to dissect. Until Whites see that they are the problem, they will never be able to solve the problem.
Like a geographical map of the world, this movie lacks the political boundaries that are a major part of the fact that a solution is not likely to be found, save in cataclysm. Political solutions, in any case, involve dehumanizing the very people one wishes to save in order to see the problem in-the-round before one can allege one is attempting to solve it.
Where the film scores is in not suggesting that the very science that has caused the problems is going to solve them, since it is impossible for science to actually alter the facts of reality. It fails, however, to avoid the attempt at numinousness by slyly implying that Nature has been given to Whites by some unnamed entity; hence, the God’s-eye-view employed throughout and that the Earth’s salvation is a largely-spiritual affair - led by god-like Whites. Yet, this visual and narrative strategy of nothing but aerial photography affectively distances us from the earth-bound humanity that the film alleges it is intent on preserving.
