Friday Night Movie

Tonight I saw Nous Resterons sur Terre. After seeing the preview several times over the past couple of weeks, I thought I should be a good citizen of the world and see it.

A literal translation of the title would be "We Will Stay on the Earth," but the English title is "Here to Stay." I thought the movie would make me feel guilty for all the mean things I had done to mother nature. I was expecting it to be a preachy, Al Gore global warming sort of movie.

But instead of a monotone narrator disapprovingly wagging his finger as smoke billows from a factory (as in An Inconvenient Truth. That movie was boring. Also, it sucked), music served as the backdrop to some stunning film shot from all over the world, from Indian to Iceland. One of four scientists/Nobel Peace Prize Winners/really important people would speak briefly between themes to transition to the next one.

The movie showed all sorts of stuff: landscapes, pigs being slaughtered, masses of people spilling onto crosswalks, tomatoes being processed, a deserted and rusted playground. And the music was right on. It always seem to match. For example, if you watch the preview, you'll see a brief clip of some humpback whales who look like they're dancing. This very last scene of the movie was paired with Sigur Rós' "Untitled 1." Gorgeous.

My point is that I learned zero facts and numbers from this movie. I don't know how many fewer trees the planet is missing each year, or how many tons of carbon monoxide are spit into the atmosphere per month. It was combining images with music really did it for me. The directors got their point across to me. They asked me, "What are you going to do when we've used it all up and there's nothing else left?" And I answered, "I don't know."