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An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former United States Vice President Al Gore’s campaign to educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show that, by his own estimate, he has given more than a thousand times.[citation needed]
Premiering at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and opening in New York City and Los Angeles on May 24, 2006, the documentary was a critical and box-office success, winning 2 Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song.[4] The film also earned $49 million at the box office worldwide, becoming the sixth-highest-grossing documentary film to date in the United States.[5]
The idea to document his efforts came from Laurie David who saw his presentation at a town-hall meeting on global warming which coincided with the opening of The Day After Tomorrow. David was so inspired by Gore’s slide show that she, with Lawrence Bender, met with Guggenheim to adapt the presentation into a film.
Since the film’s release, An Inconvenient Truth has been credited for raising international public awareness of climate change and reenergizing the environmental movement. The documentary has also been included in science curricula in schools around the world, which has spurred some controversy.
Synopsis
An Inconvenient Truth focuses on Al Gore and on his travels in support of his efforts to educate the public about the severity of the climate crisis. Gore says, “I’ve been trying to tell this story for a long time and I feel as if I’ve failed to get the message across.”[6] The film documents a Keynote presentation (which Gore refers to as “the slide show”) that Gore has presented throughout the world. It intersperses Gore’s exploration of data and predictions regarding climate change and its potential for disaster with his own life story.
The former vice president opens the film by greeting an audience with a joke: “I am Al Gore; I used to be the next President of the United States.”[7] Gore then begins his slide show on climate change; a comprehensive presentation replete with detailed graphs, flow charts and stark visuals. Gore shows off several majestic photographs of the Earth taken from multiple space missions, Earthrise and The Blue Marble.[8] Gore notes that these photos dramatically transformed the way we see the Earth, helping spark modern environmentalism.
Following this, Gore shares anecdotes that inspired his interest in the issue, including his college education with early climate expert Roger Revelle at Harvard University, his sister’s death from lung cancer and his young son’s near-fatal car accident. Gore recalls a story from his grade-school years, where a fellow student asked his geography teacher about continental drift; in response, the teacher called the concept the “most ridiculous thing [he’d] ever heard.”
Gore ties this conclusion to the assumption that “the Earth is so big, we can’t possibly have any lasting, harmful impact on the Earth’s environment.” For comic effect, Gore uses a clip from the Futurama episode “Crimes of the Hot” to describe the greenhouse effect. Gore refers to his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 United States presidential election as a “hard blow” yet one which subsequently “brought into clear focus, the mission [he] had been pursuing for all these years.”
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