Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, April 22: REVOLUTION
Rob Stewart’s environmental call to action debuted at Toronto in 2012. It has also screened at Vancouver, Santa Barbara, Newport Beach, Reykjavik, and Wild & Scenic, among others. While its initial theatrical release came several years ago, the film is now being re-released globally as a tie-in to Earth Day.
Stewart, whose festival and release tour with his previous documentary, SHARKWATER, about the decimation of sharks, took him around the world, unwisely turns his camera on himself as he expands his scope to consider the damage being done to earth’s oceans. While the scattershot survey he offers – which theoretically focuses upon ocean acidification, largely the result of man’s rampant abuse of fossil fuels – is generally informative, it doesn’t present anything particularly new that hasn’t been covered in numerous other environmentally-themed docs. Worse still, the filmmaker seems to think his presence is needed not only as a hopelessly awkward conversational narrator, but on camera meta-revisiting his previous film, interacting with other subjects, and participating in climate change protests, which makes the entire project feel utterly self-serving.
what (not) to doc 