earth2100

Janis, my apologies, I know I've been awfully uncommunicative (last weekend possibly excepted) - it seems I'm over that little problem. I've just spent a pleasant two hours with tea, a smoke and a movie. It was so perfect I wanted to give you a little review.

earth2100. I got it because of the title and because the alternative was Nostradamus and 2012 crap in French, and put it on as background noise while packing books away - 12 books later I settled down to watch it. 

It proposes 2100 as a world in ruins, total science fiction. Then it invites you to follow the story of Lucy, born in 2009. She grows up through what we could consider plausible for the near future: a world hooked on oil, ignoring environmental changes while causing progressively more damage. People live in really bad weather while Malthusian catastrophe nears.

It's written for an American audience, and the rest of the world only plays a supporting role in the unfolding drama, but Lucy's story is interesting enough to pull you through a century of eyes wide shut. The problem is that there is no time-bomb to blow us all to the seventh circle of hell, just a slow decay that we live with. Adaptability as the tragic flaw of our species? Shakespeare couldn't have chosen better.

Hurricanes, wars and rations, mass migration, mass starvation and an utterly existentialist plague all lead to complete societal collapse. It all comes across a little dramatized, a little patronizing and with a subtle whiff of political propaganda in time for the current cap-and-trade issue, but is still a possible path to purgatory. 

Probable? Mayhap - but the whole science behind predicting environmental changes seems rather 'this or that' to me and this movie also presumes to predict political, social and economic reactions. However, and this point remains valid: there is a problem now, and while we sit around like Trojans looking at the horse's ass, the earth is preparing for battle. May the best planet win :)