Lukewarm 'Warming'

"The Great Warming" knows what it's up against: eyes-glazed indifference to forewarnings about the dangers of carbon dioxide buildup to Earth's atmosphere. The documentary's strategy: Awaken those eyes with snappily edited, arresting images (darkly billowing factory smoke, hurricanes and floods in Louisiana and Florida) and vicarious visits to exotic locales around the world (all of them in imminent danger of sinking underwater). Then let Keanu Reeves and Alanis Morissette gently bend our ears with user-friendly nuggets about the ramifications of global warming.

Anyone looking for Keanu and Alanis to stretch beyond their narrator roles will be disappointed. Apart from seeing them briefly on-camera at the beginning, we just hear them reading. As for the movie, culled from a 2003 three-part series for Discovery Channel Canada, its points are timely but also disappointingly general. (By comparison, Davis Guggenheim's recent "An Inconvenient Truth," which presents Al Gore's vision of the environmental dangers posed by humankind's carbon buildup, is much more informative, pointed and entertaining.) "Great Warming" seems to want to cover everything, from identifying more evangelists who are not making this a partisan issue to showing how London closes up the Thames against sea flooding. And what meaningful links are we supposed to find between footage of New Orleans musicians and scenes of commuters shopping for cars in Beijing? The movie's point that a great culture (in Louisiana) has been lost and that increased Chinese consumption is going to heat up the planet even more is instructive but thin.

How about a well-sustained argument for saving the planet instead of this round-robin approach? And where are those holdouts of humanity who believe humans shoulder no blame for carbon dioxide buildup? Let's hear from them, too, and draw our own conclusions.

-- Desson Thomson

The Great Warming Unrated, 83 minutes Contains dire warnings about the effects of global alarming. At the Regal Fairfax.