The Trick

Ignore the ultra negative reviews. This was bound to bring out the climate change deniers , flat earthers, anti vax brigade et al. So nutters aside, this an interesting although very dry recount of a hack, that produced a global storm about a world wide scientific conspiracy to falsify the evidence for global warming. The acting is solid but the story is kind of delivered in a very uninteresting way. Its worth a watch but if you think what you read on Facebook is the same as a peer reviewed scientific paper its probably not for you.

The Trick tries very hard to make it's subject matter compelling, to make a thriller come alive from its source material, but unfortunately fails to ever really warm up.

No surprise here. All the low score reviews are from climate change deniers. Just get with the programme you lot. Most have moved on from 'it's not happening' and 'it's a conspiracy' (why? To what end?) and now are saying 'we'll ok it is happening but what about China it's mostly/all their fault so we in the west don't need to do anything'.

But, what did you think of the film?

Several reviewers barely mentioned the film itself which makes it suspicious that they actually watched it.

I'd give it 6/10 as it's not terribly exciting though very well acted. But I've upped my score to compensate for the idiot reviews.

All the elements are there so this really comes down to bad direction. If the idea is to promote action on climate change, the producers and director have done nothing except muddle things with this mishmash convoluted story. I vaguely remember when the real story broke but didn't remember the details which may be why I didn't get this film. For more than 30 mins in I had no idea what the story was about because it was just a jumble of different scenes and characters and it just made no sense and most of it was not about the main character at all, just the peripheries of the story. The main character was relegated to 1 dimensional cartoon figure constantly crying and raising his hands to his head like "The Scream" but they used so much idiotic technobabble it was hard to understand exactly what he did to deserve persecution for most of the first third of the film. Too many scenes, too much melodrama, and too many cliches, and too little relation to the main character. The acting was great; but the story direction was awful. And of course at the end there's the speech where our hero gets vindicated. But, it's interesting on one point because it's a story about a supposed conspiracy to deceive that is blamed on another conspiracy against the conspiracy but in the end, the story is about nothing much at all. Well, that is, if there was some plot of importance, they lost it. (for the record, my comments are on the film, not the topic)

While this story has merit, there is peer reviewed work out there that shows the really widespread stalling of addressing anthropomorphic aspect of climate change is not outright denial. The social science surveys and analysis show that the resistance is coming from pitching climate change solution as massive "economic justice" and wealth transfer. This especially after the massively botched Doha conference where language used in presentations and final memorandum made wealth redistribution a core aspect. In other words the exploitation of this issue and problem by certain groups who controlled the megaphone and wished to create counterproductive massive tax schemes and international bureaucracy to administer "redistribution" are the real problem in stalling progress.

This is why carbon capture and sequestration, which everyone knows will be the core solution, gets fob off by equally anti-science people in the climate change adovacy business -- because it doesn't fit with creation of giant tax bureaucracy. MIT has hundreds of people now working in their carbon capture and sequestrations project. And the top engineering universities in China, Japan and Europe all have major carbon capture programs. So unless you are going to say MIT, Princeton, Harvard, CalTech and Stanford are ant-science, don't dismiss carbon capture as the main technology that will solve this.

Denial of carbon capture is something the climate groups that want to create tax and wealth redistribution are incessantly doing. Just google: +princeton, "americans are unaware of carbon capture and sequestration technology, according to a new study"