4.5/5
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In the opening act of Racing Extinction, director Louis Psihoyos confesses that nothing is worse for the environment than making a movie about it, a heavy fact for someone as committed to awareness as he. If you’re going to succumb to a necessary evil, do it with the poignancy and desperate grandiosity of Psihoyos. With Racing Extinction, he and his team have created a loud, richly felt cry for the future of every species with which we share this precious planet. It is a movie that fills the lungs, opens the pores, and ignites the spirit. It’s skin-chilling symphony of light and sound is as visceral an experience as I’ve had with a documentary since Kevin Macdonald’s rapturous Life in a Day, and this one arguably delivers a far more frightening, commanding message: the planet is speaking to us, and every day we refuse to listen is one day closer to our own demise.
The title of the film was initially 6, an allusion to the string of major extinction events in Earth’s 3.4 billion year history, the sixth of which the film purports is poking through the horizon with staggering urgency. Each year, countless species slip away right beneath our awareness never to be seen again, and research concludes that we may be more responsible for it than anyone should have to admit. Enter Louis Psihoyos, director of the Oscar-winning The Cove, who with this film cements his status as the James Bond of documentary filmmaking. In place of an Aston Martin, he prowls America’s streets in a state-of-the-art eco-cruiser custom-made by the most adventurous of quartermasters, Elon Musk of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and spreading not razor-sharp one-liners but sobering doses of reality. He isn’t interested in what S. E. Cupp once foolishly called “scare tactics”. He doesn’t need to scare anyone; the world we live in, he realizes, does this well enough by itself. All he’s doing is giving it a podium.
The film opens with what must be the closest documentary film has ever come to a nail-biting thriller set piece during which Psihoyos and company infiltrate a luxurious California restaurant that serves sushi with whale meat to the highest paying customers. Disguised as tourists and equipped with microphones and button-sized cameras, the team gather their evidence through a kind of environmentalist espionage. This leak of hard evidence was fatal enough, but just days after, a man could be found standing outside of the restaurant entrance projecting images of whales onto a large screen to be seen by anyone walking through or even near the entrance. Two weeks later, the restaurant went out of business. He had taken information, something antiseptic, and distilled it into imagery that cut through speculation and straight to the heart. This sparked something within them. How could they take this concept of projection and repurpose it for a larger, more sweeping intent?
That is what you might call the arc of the documentary. It follows Psihoyos and his team through various high-wire acts of investigative activism and ties them together in the birth of an absolutely astonishing technical marvel that can sprawl dissolving sea shells, endangered species, and strikingly rendered statistics across the entire surface of a skyscraper. The images and animal sounds— yes, they fashioned a method of accompanying these grand-scale wonders with aural spectacle as well— it delivers are derived from the focal points of the missions we see throughout the first half of the film.
Perhaps best befitting the philosophy of its subjects, the film’s most harrowing moments are not its factual insights but its human ones, of which there are too many to list. There is the reality that fisherman cut off shark fins from a still-breathing animal and place the limbless animal back in the water, and then there is seeing it for yourself. As these creatures float aimlessly and helplessly about the ocean floor to be tossed and turned by the waters they used to slice through effortlessly, their fins are placed in vast, uncannily neat rows and stacks, creating as quietly gruesome an image as any I’ve seen at the movies: entire floors covered in fins, a horrifying mosaic of flesh, pain, and the shamelessness of the species responsible for it all.
Audiences will be faced with a fundamental question: what is the line between cinema and activism and how rigid do you wish it to be? Some will criticize the film for undercutting its more obvious cinematic virtues— unprecedented craftsmanship, genuine intelligence, and a very real heartbeat— in the name of activism, but to wield statements like that is to misunderstand the film’s intentions. This is not an even-handed examination of a nuanced issue. The subject is certainly nuanced in its scientific intricacies, but not in its veracity. The opposing voice some might want to hear in the name of balance isn’t just wrong; it’s so dangerous as to be worthy of an entire documentary by itself. To make time for it here would not only be a disservice to the film but also to the countless fauna for whom it speaks, ourselves included.
With a title like Racing Extinction, the film leaves subtly at the door, and why shouldn’t it? The planet is screaming for the help of its dominant species, and any alternative position is, as has been demonstrated both by other films and by decades of scientific inquiry before them to be grounded in agenda and outright falsehood. The film is activism without apology, which only serves to make it more impressive that it cuts so deeply and cleanly into you. The visuals pulse with life and color, and the chirps and moans of our planet’s most exotic creatures cleanse the soul like rain. Effortless and soundless are the transitions from moment to moment, so much so that all cinematic artifice disappears within minutes. It is an extraordinary achievement. The only agenda the film pushes is a deeply embedded passion for the world that allowed its makers to exist, and you need only be human to become swept up in that connection.
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: www.spencermoleda.com
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]