A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash

Black gold makes the world go round, but is running out. A Crude Awakening draws a picture of a world clambering over the final few drops and needless to say, it’s no oil painting.

An impressive number of experts from oil companies, government units and universities offer opinions on how the first world will react to dwindling oil reserves.

Working best as a history lesson, archival adverts for Esso and Ford illustrate post-WW2 America’s love affair with the black stuff and how the southern states were once awash in it. Warfare is about and fuelled by oil, and the oil shocks of the early 1970s are presented a taste of things to come.

Contemporary pictures of abandoned drills from formerly oil rich countries are strong evidence of how thirsty the whole world has become as everyone strives for a first world lifestyle.

Talking heads note how Middle Eastern nations may be over-exaggerating oil reserves to protect their interests, so the decline could be sooner than anyone realizes.

These experts, carefully chosen to avoid tree-hugger criticisms, offer no easy answers – dismissing alternate energy sources as cumbersome and costly when compared to cheap, cheerful oil, and predict a militarized future as rich nations fight for this global lubricant.

Gelpke and McCormack hammer home their thesis with passionate conviction, but for a film with one central message A Crude Awakening is a choppy movie, fragmented into hectoring chaptered scenes with too-obvious music cues (Philip Glass again?).

Crucially, this is not comfortable on the big screen. In one hour Adam Curtis' The Trap packs-in more ideas with a cinematic punch, than the eighty-three minutes here.

Chilling and depressingly plausible, but likely to be lost amidst An Inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour and whatever Michael Moore turns his hand to.

Rob Daniel