All are invite to join the club for an evening of education, entertainment and emotion, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama, Pope Francis and others.
By Josh Hughes
On January 9 at 5:30 p.m. in Communications Facility 110, the Students For Renewable Energy (SRE) will be screening “Before The Flood,” a recent climate change documentary narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Fisher Stevens. The film, which debuted on the National Geographic Channel in October, treads similar ground as Al Gore’s well known “An Inconvenient Truth” in its ultimate intent to raise awareness to the public about the the immediate effects and concerns of climate change.
Opening with a segment that touches on Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” DiCaprio creates an analogy between that work and our earth, expressing the destructive potential that we create as human beings. The film is, at its core, a realistically pessimistic take on the state that the world finds itself in, though it is not without glimmers of hope and lightness amidst the chaos.
DiCaprio, charged as the United Nation’s “Messenger of Peace on Climate Change” at the start of the film, travelled with director and co-creator Stevens for three years to remote areas of the globe to document the real life impact of climate change in a variety of situations. He witnesses crop floods in India, visible pollution in China, rampant ice melting in Greenland and deforestation in Indonesia, giving the film a pervading sense of immediacy and urgency.
Filmed at the same time as “The Revenant,” also starring DiCaprio, “Before the Flood” features conversations between Alejandro G. Iñárritu (director of “The Revenant”) and DiCaprio in which they discuss visible shifts in climate change in relation to the film they made together. Iñárritu provides his own commentary on environmental crises, and his interactions with DiCaprio come off as genuine, like eavesdropping on a conversation between two friends.
Elsewhere in the documentary, DiCaprio has discussions with Barack Obama, Al Gore and Pope Francis, all of whom find DiCaprio eager to their perspectives on what can be done about the climate crisis.
A large focus of the documentary addresses climate change deniers, going in depth into different, alternate explanations as to why people in positions of power would publicly denounce global warming. The film swiftly moves between interview segments and narration clips in which DiCaprio talks about some of the politics and ins and outs of environmental change, never coming across as preachy.
While certainly an educational movie, “Before The Flood” also seeks to move the viewer; the information on display here elicits emotions from the filmgoers, and DiCaprio and Stevens have ultimately crafted a grounded documentary on where we stand, environmentally speaking, in the 21st century.
“Before The Flood” will be put on by the SRE this Monday at 5:30, be sure not to miss this chance to see the film on a big screen.