Yong-han Jung: Academic movie review: Stupidity? (The Age of Stupid)

Are humans intelligent?

It is definite that humans are intelligent. Humans know how to control their instincts unlike other animals, and their acts are based on rationality. However, even if humans are intelligent and rational, they are so stupid that they make themselves dangerous by their own hands almost to the death. Which means, human activities that are done so far is threatening their own human beings.

Now, it is THE AGE OF STUPID. Human's eagerness of comfortability caused many harms(global warming, climate change) to our planet and it will happen more frequently in the future. And the movie 'The Age of Stupid' is a good example for stupid human behaviors toward the climate change.

The Age of Stupid is a short movie directed and written by Franny Armstrong in 2009. This movie is a documentary movie, made by combinations of many documentary film about climate change. The story begins with an old archivist from devastated earth of 2055 living in a archive where all the resources are stored. Before the old man starts to show documentary, you can notice that he is repeating same question over and over again with the regret mixed into his voice.

"We could've save ourselves."

This short sentence contains many things that will be discussed later on the movie.

We could've save ourselves but we didn't. We could've save ourselves from the climate change but we did not do that. Why not?

The purpose of this movie is to persuade audiences that climate change is a serious problem that we face today and we have be desirable to solve this problem not just being stupid. But, since this movie is just 89 minutes, it seems hard to persuade the audiences in such a short time. However, by providing examples of real documentary films, it makes the movie more credible and unbiased by looking at one problem with different perspectives. And the movie especially talks about the oil(oil is the main cause of stupid human activities), providing different view with three people.

Oil also known as petroleum has been dominating our lives since late 19 century. It is used in variety of purposes starting from transportation to clothing. Now, the demand for this cheap and efficient energy source has grown so rapidly that it's the most used energy source throughout the world. In order to give more accurate and unbiased view, the movie shows three different documentaries related to oil.

The first documentary is about a story of young aged man who owns his low-price airline in India. Airlines are one of the most high consumers of petroleum since their jobs is to fly airplanes for far-distances, so a lot of oil is consumed. For the international airplanes about 36,000 gallons of oil is used for 10 hour flight.

Second documentary film that archivist shows is about a man who works for an oil company called 'Shell'. His work is to analyze the samples brought from the under ocean and he decides whether it is adaptable place to drill the oil. Thus, he is contributing to the oil production.

For the last, there is a woman from Nigeria who suffers from harm driven by the oil companies. There is no clean drinking water for them to drink, and the atmosphere became murky that it is even hard to breathe. All these harms came from desire of oil companies to make more profit.

Now, by taking three examples with the perspective of economy, we can notice there is serious inequality among these people. First example is a 'consumption activity', second one is 'production activity', and the last one is 'allocation activity'. Each three activities rely on each other to form a economy system having all having profits. However, Nigerian woman from the third example gets all the harms from the process of production and consumption. For example, strong and rich country like USA consumes huge amount of gasoline and huge amount of carbon dioxide is being emitted to the atmosphere which causes the global warming. Thus, it seems fair that USA gets all the disadvantages for producing greenhouse gas but it all goes to the underdeveloped countries especially located near the equator. Total increase of temperature of the earth is just critical to them unlike USA, located in the northern hemisphere. These countries suffer many climate changes like flood and hurricanes driven by developed countries. Developed countries get to have benefits contrary to underdeveloped countries.

The reason that I chose 'Stupidity?' for my writing is because I wanted to question if human beings are intelligent(What is the standard point of intelligency?). Other animals which are concerning about extinction of their specie might be regarded as more intelligent animals than human beings in our 'Age of Stupid'. Now it is time for us to look back at ourselves worring about the future as we did in the long past before the evolution and making earth a better place for our future generations.