Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Covers a range of issues, joined with an engaging personal narrative and culminating in a message that there is hope but we need to get involved in the movement for good. Great cinematography including beautiful underwater scenes and well produced overall.Whilst it has a similar message to 'An Inconvenient Truth' or 'Age of Stupid' it also has something in common with David Attenborough wildlife films before it goes on to cover the Canadian tar sands issue. Then it specifically deals with the need for international cooperation at climate conferences and the need to hold politicians who attend to account, and how young people are so engaged and involved. While we have annual climate conferences this will always be topical.

An educational and sometimes eye-opening movie event was enjoyed by around 100 attendees last Wednesday at Salem's Southern New Hampshire University. NextGen Climate – NH and Regional Field Director McKenzie St. Germain hosted a full evening that included refreshments, a showing of the independent movie REVOLUTION, an entertaining, interactive talk by New England Aquarium Education Director John Anderson, followed by informal discussions by the audience. The evening's topic centered on the worsening problem of climate change/global warming, and steps we all can take to become more aware of what we, our families and friends can do to mitigate it. The ridiculing and goofy bumper sticker days are over, as anyone who has the slightest inkling of what is happening right in front of us already knows. This fact was pointed out in both visually beautiful as well as unnerving ways by REVOLUTION,the 85-minute documentary directed by Rob Stewart that opened the evening. Stewart also directed an earlier doc, SHARKWATER, and it was while he was filming that movie that he received one of those epiphanies that we all get sometimes that there was an even bigger situation occurring than what he was then concentrating on.One of the problems with climate change is the fact that until the last couple decades its deleterious effects weren't obvious to most people in their day-to-day lives. Those of us who peruse cutting-edge books, online informational studies, etc. were onto the problem long before warming became routinely accepted. But there are still many people whose only knowledge of this universal concern is the well-known plight of the polar bears up in the Arctic, mainly because this piece of information went viral years ago in TV and print.REVOLUTION's excellence rests on the incredible job that Stewart and his team did in shooting hours and hours of the underbelly of the ongoing predicament, including close-up shots of the world's rapidly dying coral reefs, various fish/crustacean species in their natural habitat (many on the endangered list), amusing and poignant views of monkey-like lemurs living, loving and playing together, the director and team swimming underwater intermingling with schools of sharks….all fascinating.Stewart's narration complements the visuals perfectly, as instead of the typical professional and analytical tone taken by most scientists in nature documentaries we get to listen to a younger voice (32 years old at time of filming) whose awe and fear of what he was discovering as the cinematic process commenced comes through loud and clear. His friendly and personal style seems to be saying that he's "one of us" despite his superior knowledge about his subject, and we get more of a kinship with what he is imparting than we would from someone dryly talking over our heads.Stewart cites a wealth of statistics: the Great Barrier Reef's 38% reduction of coral over the past 25 years; 44% of America's electricity still coming from coal despite all the knowledge we've gleaned over the past half-century about the unquestionable warming effects of CO2 emissions; ocean acidification that is happening faster and faster, destroying our seas' ecosystem; Canada, China and many other nations being willful partners with the United States in mostly ignoring the ongoing threat, and man's continuing deforestation around the world (his sidebar animal species/forest scenes filmed in Madagascar are simultaneously comical and tragic).Much of this data is already available and has been for some time to the interested. What Stewart's movie is attempting to do is to make this knowledge more mainstream to the thankfully slowly-dwindling number of people and governments around the world still denying the obvious. The director attended a number of world conferences on the subject, and in REVOLUTION he shares some of the speeches by leaders, politicians and scientists at these affairs, as well as encouraging shots of young activists before and after the events, all of them galvanized about making other nations aware of our responsibility to lower our burning of fossil fuels and lessen our reliance on automobiles.What we all have to realize is that only 10% of the ongoing warming the earth is experiencing is happening in our air – 90% is occurring in our oceans. Our upper atmosphere has become a heat-trapping blanket over the near-two centuries since the Industrial Revolution, a simple fact that anyone with an aquarium and a little fuel and tinder can experimentally recreate at home. And despite being cyclical, the (literally) countless tons of pollutants and hot emissions that have been spewed into our air over those years have made warming increase exponentially, with thousands of instances including the 4-year drought in California, many Arctic ice caps becoming mostly lakes, numerous animal species dying off : all making the necessity of human intervention crystal-clear.Please GOOGLE NextGen Climate for more information on what you can do to both learn more about something we ALL should be aware of, and to hopefully start changing the mindsets of our acquaintances who may still be stuck in the past. We're all in this together, and for anyone who cares about the world we're going to leave to our children's children's children, as well as the health and continuance of our animal species, forests and natural wonders, this is all necessary knowledge.

The movie Revolution by Rob Stewart was a very academic film. It used a very academic approach to conveying a global message about the environment. To me, it was the conceptualization that captured the essence of the film. The conceptualization was about how the individuals within the upper layers of the hierarchy make decisions about how the lower levels of the hierarchy should live. Rob Stewart seemed to be trying to advocate for social injustices being done to the poor and at the same time, he was conveying a message about how corporations were constantly moving ahead with their plans while destroying parts of the environment. In 2013, this film-theme is one of pure universalism - for example - the idea that corporations are entities and at times they are not always doing what is right for human-beings.In a way Rob Stewart was like Michael Moore - trying hard for society to change. However I found the message of the movie to have been delivered in a very conventional way - and I found that how the message was conveyed to have been so academic - that it just fell flat.Furthermore, the topic about the environment is such a futuristic topic - as how does one really know what the future will look like? There are currently so many natural disasters in the world today - how does one know if human beings are destroying the planet - or if the planet is destroying herself - in the way of a natural selection.I much preferred his previous movie about sharks.Written by Annuska

I am a big fan of Rob Stewart's work. He had me at Sharkwater. His latest film shows beautiful footage of some of the world's amazing living things, and then the not so beautiful as well, such as Alberta's oil sands. Stewart is very humble in his approach, acknowledging the importance of holding yourself accountable for environmental impacts, and he definitely does not leave his own impact out of the equation. The best feature of this film is that it is highly empowering for youth. As an educator, I highly recommend taking your students to see this film. Our school took every kid from grade five through eight to see it before it even hit theatres. It is potentially in theatres for only a few weeks so go now before it is too late.