THE AGE OF STUPID: FRANNY ARMSTRONG 2009

The Age of Stupid is a 2009 film by the filmmaker Franny Armstrong about the effects of climate change and global warming on earth. The links to my Global Warmning piece are evident so I decided to analyse it. Franny Armstrong is a politically conscious filmmaker and has made several other campaigning feature documentaries to highlight environmental and political issues such as McDonalds and globalisation in McLibel (2005) and Drowned Out (2003) dealing with an Indian family who are about to be drowned by the Narada Dam which will consume their village. Armstrong's films are generally crowd funded but have accessed huge audiences which have together been seen by 70 million people on TV, cinema, internet and DVD worldwide. Her social conscious spreads through to her work where she has pioneered and championed reducing carbon emissions including the distribution and screening of her works.

The basic conceit of Age Of Stupid is a man (Pete Postlethwaite) on a now melted arctic outpost of earth in the near future (2055). He has archived mankind's downfall  at their own hands due to global warming in his global archive and through looking back at the year 2008 and a mix of real news and documentary footage and archive and created animations weaves a fictional yet factually grounded cautionary tale.

The news footage ranges from the obvious global warning effects and weather etc to the stories of a few spotlighted subjects to show the topic and argument from multiple viewpoints. A environmentally friendly wind farm planner, an Indian man starting up a low cost airline in India and a woman from Nigeria struggling to survive. Also an oil company employee who faced hurricane Katrina, a French mountain guide commenting on the shrinking of the glaciers and an Iraqi boy who was made a refugee due to the allegedly oil inspired Iraqi war. All of these people saw the climate change effects first hand through their own looking glass and it deals with the moral questions, issues and ethics from all of their standpoints..

The techniques employed to tell the story are varied and interesting especially the real news footage of real characters telling their story has a huge amount more kudos given the reflective situation of looking back from a destroyed planet. The irony of the Indian starting up a low cost airline using a private jet to do his "charity work" when the cost to the environment works against this as does the cost where the money the flight cost could have instantly turned around the fortunes of the village he is trying to save. The awkwardness of the "environmental" not in my back yard campaigners who are protesting against having a wind farm near their very middle class village whilst at the same time being challenged at saying they are environmentalists. These arguments work well if at times they are a little heavy handed and obvious. The multi strand story-line did at times make the flow of the film hard to follow however and perhaps too many points were being made at the same time so none made as strongly as they could have been.

The film is a very interesting premise to look back and try to fathom why as a human race we ignored all of the tell tale signs around us with the perspective of hind-sight. However it does not really offer much in the way of solutions rather than just reasons. Greed, oil, ignorance, selfishness and a collective no one else is bothering so why should I to what Postlethwaite calls the suicide of our planet. In terms of solutions the film itself realises it is a hard-sell and other than oil is bad, green energy should be exploited more and hopefully individuals need to be accountable.



THINGS I WILL TAKE FROM THE AGE OF STUPID.

• Using "real" people and doco footage gave it a sense of authenticity.
• Characters within the film worked well BUT multi strand story telling possibly not as effective as one story.
• Use of animation, archive news and doco, CGI and graphics worked really well and gave serious, fun and accessible ways into the topic.
• The conceit is good what would we think of a behaviour and general complacency towards climate change with hindsight.