An Inconvenient Truth

A slide projector clicks. Al Gore, in a gray suit and a loosened tie, stands at a lectern and tells a joke about being 'the former next president of the United States.' The audience laughs. Then he shows them a graph, and the room goes quiet. That contrast, between the folksy self-deprecation and the hard data on the screen, is the engine of An Inconvenient Truth, Davis Guggenheim's 2006 film built almost entirely around a lecture Gore had been giving for years. The budget was about $1 million. It grossed more than $46 million worldwide, a rare showing for a documentary, and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Guggenheim keeps the presentation as the spine but cuts away to Gore's life: a Tennessee farm, a Senate hearing, the aftermath of the 2000 election. Those interludes keep the film from feeling like a filmed PowerPoint, though the science remains the main event. Billy West supplies a few voice bits, and archival footage brings in Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and George H. W. Bush, mostly to show how the issue got handled, or shelved, across administrations. The PG rating reflects a few grim sequences about ice loss and species collapse rather than any profanity or violence.

The tone is earnest and often wry. Gore delivers dry asides, but he never softens the material. What the film lacks in cinematic flash it makes up for in clarity, and its 93 percent Tomatometer suggests critics found the approach persuasive. It belongs to the An Inconvenient collection alongside its 2017 follow-up, and it remains a standard reference point in climate communication, two decades after its release. [edit]

The film opens backstage at a lecture hall. Al Gore is fiddling with a laptop, running through slides. Then he walks out, cracks a joke about the 2000 election, and starts talking about dirt. Specifically, the soil on the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, where he learned about seasons and crops as a kid. It is a disarming start. Within minutes, though, he is showing a graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa since 1958, the Keeling Curve, and explaining what it means.

Gore's argument unfolds in blocks. He draws on Antarctic ice cores to show that CO2 and temperature have moved together for hundreds of thousands of years. He puts up photographs of glaciers taken decades apart, the ice retreating up the valley walls. He shows satellite images of Mount Kilimanjaro's shrinking snowcap and the Himalayas' receding glaciers. He walks through the mechanics of the greenhouse effect, then through the feedback loops that could accelerate it: melting permafrost releasing methane, white ice giving way to dark water that absorbs more heat. The film cuts away periodically to Gore's life, his sister's death from lung cancer and the family's decision to quit tobacco farming, his travels to places already feeling the effects. These sequences are brief. They explain why he cares without turning the film into a biography.

The antagonist is not a person. It is a set of conditions: clear evidence colliding with political inertia, corporate-funded disinformation, and public complacency. Gore addresses the media's habit of presenting a scientific consensus alongside a tiny minority of skeptics as though the two sides were equal. He criticizes the framing of climate change as a political issue rather than a moral and physical one. Archival footage of Reagan, the first Bush, and the second Bush shows how the issue was handled, or shelved, across administrations, including Gore's own time in the Senate and White House.

Guggenheim shot the lecture primarily at a presentation in Los Angeles, with additional footage from other stops, and edited it down from roughly 100 hours of material. The film contains no dramatized reenactments and no on-screen villain. Its power comes from the clarity of the presentation and the charisma of its presenter. Gore is wry and self-deprecating, but the material escalates in seriousness as the film moves along. The final act pivots from diagnosis to prescription, laying out individual actions (compact fluorescent bulbs, fuel-efficient cars, recycling) and political ones (carbon taxes, emissions trading, the Kyoto Protocol). The presentation ends on a call to action rather than a resolution.[edit]