Al Gore might have lost the presidency in 2000, but he wound up taking home an Oscar for the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. That’s some consolation prize, but the 2006 film—which was a recorded version of a slide show about climate change Gore had been giving around the world for years—didn’t have the sort of impact it needed to save the planet.
Ten years after An Inconvenient Truth premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Gore and Robert Redford, the festival’s creator, were on hand to premiere An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power on Sundance’s opening night this year (and, not coincidentally, the evening before a known climate change denier is set to take the Oval Office). Once again, the film shows Gore crusading to save the planet, but this time, he doesn’t have to show animation of rising seas flooding the site of the World Trade Center in New York; he can show actual footage of that happening during Superstorm Sandy.
Videos by VICE
With 14 of the Earth’s 15 hottest years happening since 2001, so much that Gore predicted in that original film has come true, and still not much has changed. He also addresses other atrocities that have happened because of climate change: the deadly heat wave in India, the rapidly melting glaciers in Greenland, and the Syrian civil war, which research shows was partially caused by global warming.
The follow-up is directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk (who take over from David Guggenheim, who directed the original), and they show Gore worrying that his failure to take the White House was a failure to the environment. He also discusses trying to “fix the democracy crisis” so that the government can take proper steps to address the changing climate. Sadly, with the incoming administration, that seems less and less likely.
Still, Gore had a message of hope from the festival crowd, who gave him and the film a standing ovation. “We’re going to win this,” Gore told the crowd, according to Vulture. “The reality has been that the maximum that’s politically feasible has fallen short of the minimum the scientists tell us is necessary to save the planet balance, according to what the laws of physics dictate.”
“If anybody doubts that we have the capacity and the will to act,” he said, “just remember that the will to act is itself a renewable resource.”
