The Island President

As much as I enjoy a well written and unique story that has been created for the sake of entertainment, it is always nice to throw in a well made documentary from time to time. It wasn't the best made documentary that I have ever seen, but The Island President was an eye opening movie to the issue that is global warming and global flooding. The movie follows the president of the Maldives (or rather former president since he resigned according to the end of the movie) and his effort to try and get a worldwide effort towards reducing carbon emissions. I don't completely understand the science behind all of it, but somehow the carbon emissions are what create global warming and are the driving force for melting the ice caps. The reason that the Maldives and its president is more significant when talking about the climate issue is because the Maldives is the lowest lying country in the world. According to the movie, the highest point in the whole country is only something like 6 meters above sea level, so there exists a real possibility that the whole country will disappear completely under water because of the rising sea level.

The movie was relatively slow, and I'm not going to lie, there were a couple of points in the movie where I nodded off. However, there were many interesting points in the movie that were eye opening, one of which was seeing the overall selfishness of many countries that truly did not seem to care about the idea of a whole country disappearing. As an american and having had limited interaction with other cultures and their views, it was interesting seeing how these people (mostly from the Maldives and Denmark) felt about other countries such as the U.S., India, and China. It was a fairly sad portrayal of how selfishness and shortsightedness really does affect politics. I was happy though that the U.S., it seemed, did not oppose the passage of the agreement being pushed for by the Maldives. Although I'm fairly pessimistic about the chances of the Maldives' chances of surviving, it was still a good experience to watch the movie and hope that at the very least if they fail to survive, it will lead to the rest of the world wising up to the problem.

Also, it surprised me at first to recognize so many great Radiohead songs within the movie. It then led me to look up the soundtrack to the movie which led me to many articles explaining how Thom Yorke (lead singer of Radiohead) gave the film makers rights to use all of their songs, which was awesome to me. I knew that Thom was a big activist, so I wasn't completely shocked. It did make me happy though seeing one of my favorite bands supporting a good cause.