The Age of Stupid

Climate change is a tricky fish to dramatise, but if anyone is likely to succeed in making a compelling and emotionally engaging work out of the subject, it's Franny Armstrong, director of McLibel (2005, which followed two campaigners to the High Court to face McDonald's).

Mixing drama and documentary, Armstrong transports us to the year 2055 where Pete Postlethwaite is the last person on earth, an archivist adrift somewhere beyond Norway who employs a touch-screen device to call up genuine news reports from 2009.

There are six of these stories, including the French mountain guide Fernand Pereau who is witnessing the demise of the Alpine glaciers thanks to the steady stream of cars that roll past his door and on through the Mont Blanc tunnel; Piers Guy, a British entrepreneur who finds that, while people are theoretically in favour of alternative energy, they are in practice less enthusiastic when he wants to build wind turbines near their homes; and Jeh Wadia, an Indian businessman who has the two seemingly contradictory dreams of building his country's third low-cost airline and eradicating national poverty.

Of course the issue here is simple: do we heed these warnings now and make the drastic changes we need to, or find ourselves floating somewhere past Norway one day with just Pete Postlethwaite for company? But Armstrong is careful not to be hysterical, even mooting the idea that Wadia's dreams could work in tandem. Altogether, it makes a stimulating and intelligent film. ·