‘An Inconvenient Sequel’ Bumped Back to Incorporate Trump’s Paris Accord Decision
Between its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 and its theatrical release last month, Laura Poitras’ WikiLeaks documentary Risk transformed into a different film. In that interim year, her subject Julian Assange nabbed quite a few headlines as he stuck his thumb in the 2016 Presidential election, and Poitras rightly believed she’d have to recut the film to account for all the new developments. And now, in a similar situation, another festival-feted non-fiction film has been made to rewrite its own story as real-world news breaks.
Yesterday, our current Commander-in-Chief announced that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Accord, an international agreement intended to curb the acceleration of global warming. While not the most disastrous consequence of this decision, this seismic shift in climate policy will delay Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel one slim week as directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk rush to incorporate President Trump’s move. Originally slated for July 28, the sequel to the jimmy-rustling doc An Inconvenient Truth will now run on August 4 — a pretty good time to run, too, as its only box-office competition will be the barely existent Dark Tower adaptation and Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit.
An Inconvenient Truth ended with the urgent message that we’re all doomed if we don’t do something soon. That was eleven years ago, and not only did we fail to do something soon, we kept on doing the things we were doing. So can expect the final act of this new sequel to be something close to “We are all going to die!”? Have a lovely weekend!