“We we were so isolated we thought we’d be immune from the tribulations of this world,” says Anote Tong, former president of the equatorial island nation of Kiribati. “But no.” Indeed, like the Maldives, this little paradise will be consumed by rising seal levels by the end of the century. It’s also being battered for the first time on record by unholy mega-storms.

For a politician, Tong is remarkably frank, patiently informing various wheel-spinning climate summit attendees and well-paid, needlessly combative British media idiots: “You’re next.” He looks a little like Obama, but more sincerely charming and not so full of shit. Meanwhile, we follow the progress of an I-Kiribati woman separated from her family in New Zealand, and we see what a future of surging climate change refugees looks like.

Even more frightening is the multi-trillion dollar undersea Logan’s Run-style community pitched as a “solution” by some lunatics at a Japanese corporation, in turn suggesting that it might do us all some good, actually, to adopt the pragmatic sense of hopelessness embodied by Mr. Tong, who calls Kirabati’s luckless douching by the developed world “an act of war.” Director Matthieu Rytz’s water-level camera recalls, if anything, Peter Weir’s apocalyptic The Last Wave. Which is apt: we should feel drowned by this film. 

May, 2018