Film Reflection 2! This Changes Everything!

Lindsay Harris

COMM 3824-01

3/14/19

Film Reflection 2: This Changes Everything

            It was instantly clear to me within the first five minutes of this film, that this documentary was unlike any other environmental documentary I had seen previously. Naomi Klein is incredibly transparent in what she believes to be a useful tactic in getting the point across about environmental activism versus what she thinks has no impact on viewers. For instance, she starts the film off by talking about how every other environmental documentary talks about the polar bears and shows glacial ice caps falling apart. I can relate when she says it does not do much for her, because I can understand where she is coming from. However at the end of the film she brings up the polar bears again saying that what actually gets to her, is when filmmakers make the issues about us; and while that can come across as selfish, it’s the truth.

            I thought it was interesting that for a majority of the film they did not utilize music or animated graphics. If there was music in certain parts, it was so subtle that I barely noticed and it added nothing to the messaging of the film. The film primarily used interviews from people all around the world impacted by variations of the same sort of issue. People in Greece, China, and India spoke about how their government was allowing large corporations to exploit their natural resources in order to foster economic growth. However all of that comes at the expense of the well-being of the citizens of these countries.

            It broke my heart to watch clips from the film about the air quality in China. Seeing that some cities had upwards of 180 days of pollution, meaning they were advised against going outside, and had to wear face masks if they did so, was appalling. When the little girl in that film said that she had never seen stars in the night sky and that she had only seen a clear blue sky a few times in her life made me worry for the future of our planet. It was odd to hear that some people view the Earth as a machine, and people as the engineers of the machine-being able to bend and control the Earth to make it do as we please.

            I feel like a statistic that has been thrown into every video and documentary we’ve watched so far is the tipping point of the temperature not being able to rise more than 2 degrees celsius higher than what it currently is. This number seems a little idealistic and I feel like we will pass it in no time. I worry then, about the people like those towards the end of the film at the Sixth Annual Conference on Climate Change. At first, it seemed like this was a conference to genuinely try to find and discuss solutions for climate change, however it was highly upsetting to realize this was a conference to make fun of those who believe in climate change. I wonder what it might take to show these people how critical this issue is. I believe we can take a page from Germany’s book, as opposed to waiting for our government to make decisions on climate activism and policies, we should be proactive and take things into our hands. By forcing our government to listen to us and create policies around our positive actions, we can speed up the processes necessary to making real progress towards fighting to protect our planet.