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An Inconvenient Truth.

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An Inconvenient Truth

Produced by Lawrence Bender, Scott Burns, Scott Z. Burns, Laurie Lennard; directed by Davis Guggenheim; camera operator, Davis Guggenheim; edited by Jay Lash Cassidy, Dan Sweitlik; original music by Michael Brook, Melissa Etheridge, with AI Gore. Color, 100 mins. A Paramount Classics release.

For a film whose global-warming theme is unlikely to be news to most of its viewers, An Inconvenient Truth is full of surprises. Perhaps the biggest is that, after all, this isn't Al Gore's slide show; it's really Davis Guggenheim's movie. The film offers viewers an emotionally rich, visually entertaining story. Also a little shocking is that Al Gore is such a compelling central character. A third surprise is that although Gore argues that global warming is "a moral issue," in tact he makes a superb case for addressing it politically, in a democratic way. Guggenheiln and Gore have succeeded in making, of all things, a hopeful disaster movie.

Even the slide show was never a slide show, at least not in the sense that you or I would do a slide show. Gore's presentation on the imminent catastrophe of global warming has highly sophisticated animation, stunting (Gore has to get into a hydraulic riser to get to the top of the graph showing how quickly temperatures have risen), punchy intertitles, computer modeling and high-resolution photographs of glaciers, mountains, and rivers that are heart-stopping. The presentation is structured to address the reality of the threat authoritatively, without cant or ten-cent words.

The presentation leaves no doubt that global warming has increased exponentially in our lifetimes and is on an upward curve so...