‘Cool It’’ arrives having been labeled the anti-“An Inconvenient Truth.’’ It is. But not in the philistinistic way you’d expect. The lanky Swedish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg runs around this documentary — mostly in snug black T-shirts — telling people that money devoted to rolling back global warming, which he acknowledges as a true problem, is being misspent. Rather than trying to ratify costly, ineffectual international accords, the nations of the world should be paying to fight, say, malnutrition and improve education, and they should back the development of clean-energy solutions.
Cool It
‘Cool It’ takes a dig at ‘Truth’
I’d back the development of a better strategy for how to put Lomborg’s frustration across in a movie. Ondi Timoner, whose previous, much better documentaries include “Dig!’’ and “We Live in Public,’’ directed “Cool It,’’ and she tosses in a little of everything. But to what end? In the opening minutes, a cartoon Earth melts like a scoop of ice cream while British children whine about how scared they are of global warming. Lomborg contends that they — and we — have been brainwashed into thinking that climate change is the greatest threat to mankind. He contends, mostly from the stage of a Yale lecture hall, that it’s a manageable crisis.
Most of his lecture is devoted to debunking “An Inconvenient Truth,’’ Davis Guggenheim’s runny film of Al Gore and his famous global warming PowerPoint show. Assertion by assertion, Lomborg disputes Gore. The movie’s talk of apocalyptic sea levels and hurricanes, epidemic malaria, and the end of polar bears is a stretch; all Gore does, Lomborg says, is hyperbolize.
On one level, this is one filmmaker thumbing her nose at another. Unfortunately, a lot of what was wrong with Guggenheim’s movie is wrong with Timoner’s. “Cool It’’ has just as many lifeless shots of a man pleading for change during a slide show. Lomborg’s beliefs about bad priorities might be true, but the movie doesn’t make much of a case for them.
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