Movie Review: Collapse (2009)

Author and theorist Michael Ruppert discusses his views on where mankind is headed in terms of global issues like energy, politics, and war. The film has the same structure as An Inconvenient Truth, which came out a couple of years earlier - one man gives a lecture while stock footage and graphics support and decorate his arguments.

Ruppert, a former police officer who has ties to the CIA, is articulate and passionate, and for the most part convincing as he chain-smokes his way through a stream-of-consciousness narrative about the imminent decline and fall of our oil-based existence. Throughout the film, though, I couldn't help thinking that there's something the audience is not being told about him (what it is, I don't know).

The film makers take all of his arguments at face value. Rather than giving him space to emote and have on-camera epiphanies, it would have been better if Ruppert's interviewer had challenged him more often to prove what he was saying wasn't more than one guy looking out his window and connecting the dots with his own internal biases and guesswork.

It's going to be interesting to think about Y2K imminent-doom films like this, several years after their release. Were folks like Ruppert right, or are they guilty of the kind of sky-is-falling rhetoric that every generation espouses, thinking there's no way Mankind can survive the current Now, only to have it not only survive but actually move forward? Time will tell...

My Rating: 5/10 ("Liked It")