Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #134: Before the Flood (2016).

Leonardo DiCaprio, one-time King of the World and Best Actor Oscar winner, has also been a high-profile environmental activist for over a decade now. He teamed with Fisher Stevens, director of the Oscar-winning 2009 anti-dolphin-hunting documentary The Cove, to make this 2016 doco for National Geographic about climate change and despite my concern about that issue, the results here for me are very mixed.

DiCaprio and Stevens have proven their sincerity in caring for the natural world, but I think they quite gravely miscalculated in how they approached this documentary. The key problem I had was DiCaprio's appearing on screen here. I consider him a tremendous actor and I understand if they felt his appearing on camera would make the film more marketable but I simply found the degree of his presence on screen here, particularly with all his famous movie roles, very distracting from the content. Subsequently it ultimately became for me more of a promotion of his own activism. I think had he just produced it, the film would've had a far stronger emotional and intellectual impact, and it would've still had his name attached for marketing. It doesn't help that Fisher insists on invoking so many too-familiar visual and audio tropes, like TV weather reports and downbeat piano music. That eventually had me yawning.

Overall, its heart is absolutely in the right place but its brains are not. I say stick to An Inconvenient Truth or the works of Michael Moore instead.