Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) was an effective consciousness-raising exercise, focusing on Al Gore’s “slide shows”, as he calls them, on the reality of climate change. Eleven years on, the sequel brings home the intensification of the crisis: needless to say, as the film’s timeline approaches the present, the spectre of Trump looms like an iceberg on a foggy Arctic night. As Gore visits the world’s environmental flashpoints, the footage of floods, storms and exploding glaciers adds ballast to the statistics. There’s a sliver of against-the-clock narrative at the 2015 Paris climate summit, although the film simplifies matters in suggesting that India’s coming on board was the result of Gore making a few well-placed phone calls behind the scenes. Useful as a teaching tool, strictly functional as cinema.
