Me: Wanna see a movie tonight?
Her: Sure! Have one in mind?
Me: Yeah.
Her: What’s it about?
Me: It’s a slide-show by Al Gore about global warming.
Her: …

I’ll spare you an actual movie review of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and (appropriately, I think) fire a few bullet points at you instead.

It was an hour-long commercial for Apple.

There were plenty of scenes of “Al working hard on his presentation” with clear shots of the Keynote UI (look how he drags and drops!). The Apple logo on the back of his PowerBook was almost the visual anchor in many scenes. Just think how much energy Al’s gonna save when he upgrades to a Dual Core!

I wonder how many viewers of the film will be aware of Gore’s status on the Apple Computer, Inc. Board of Directors.

Next to video and film, Powerpoint is one of the great medium of our time.

I mean “great” as in “[r]emarkable or outstanding in magnitude”, not as in “[s]uperior in quality or character”.

The presentation Gore gives avoids the typical bullet-point-slide format for the most part. There aren’t even too many distracting slide transitions. Still, it is essentially a PowerPoint presentation (yeah, yeah, I know – he uses Keynote, not PowerPoint – see above). I can’t imagine the movie being a success if it was purely based on an hour-and-a-half speech by Gore. I can’t see people lining up for an Al Gore, David Suzuki, and Stephen Lewis triple-bill.

The visual aspects of the show make the speech palatable. The photography was perhaps the most compelling. Regardless of their real meaning and weight, some of the before/(twenty-years)after photos were extraordinary. The visualizations of data was equally compelling, but also just as questionable. The charts went way beyond the Tufte-style elimination of all but the essential. The scale was removed from most graphs leaving little more than a scary red line that screams, “look at that line, it’s going UP!”

Oh yeah, and here’s my review: interesting, entertaining, too many Apple cameos, not much new here, but a good summary of everything you’ve already heard about climate change.