C+Directed by Robert Stone Review by Jon Kissel |  |
An activist documentary that avoids an alarmist view, Pandora's Promise doesn't end with calls to action, imploring the viewer to give to a non-profit or call their representatives. Instead, Robert Stone's film in praise of nuclear power has an 'everything's fine' tone, a welcome alternative to oft-bleak agitprop filmmaking. This academic film doesn't have villains caught in split-second journalistic photos leaving their corporate headquarters. Pandora's Promise offers the hope of its titular demigod, positing a world where radiation and greenhouse gases don't have to be let out into the atmosphere and everyone can get what they want in an environmentally-sound fashion. Stone does lean too far into near-shilling for the Exelon's of the world, as the picture he paints is too rosy to be wholly complete and accurate, but his film is a corrective to the oft-hysterical brand of environment docs.
Stone spends the first minutes of his intriguing film demonstrating why a fear of nuclear power is justifiable, cutting between the abandoned area around Fukushima, laughable corporate videos from the mid-20th-century, and clips from The Simpsons. He then turns down the heat on these common presumptions, tracing fear-mongering ads to oil company rivals and hyping new reactor technology that generates far less waste than older models. Unimpressed with renewables (and his footage of unmoving windmills could be pulled directly from a Club for Growth ad) and unwilling to tell poor nations that are just coming into consistent energy generation to conserve, Stone frames his argument in persuasive climate change terms, where being anti-nuclear is the same as being pro-fossil fuel.
When Stone is using experts to make his points, Pandora's Promise is a compelling feature-length episode of Frontline. The more cinematic aspects, reminiscent of the Michael Moore school of documentaries, devalue the scholarly efforts that have come before while still being mostly entertaining. In what seems to be a frivolous excuse to globe-hop, Stone goes from location to location, popping up on camera to show the reading on a Geiger counter. In baldly-unscientific but amusing comparisons, he shows that a pristine Brazilian beach that's believed to have healing powers is bathing in a little less radiation than the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. It's around the famous Ukrainian disaster site that Stone is the most frustratingly flip. He briefly interviews a family who flaunted the rules and moved back in shortly after the incident. They say everything's fine, so everything must be fine. He acknowledges the deaths that occurred as an immediate result, but shrugs when talking about the increased cancer incidence amongst those who were living nearby. Why Stone felt the need to transition to anecdote where he had been using data is a disappointing turn.
What doesn't come up in Pandora's Promise is the nigh-insurmountable cost of building nuclear plants, even as the long-held NIMBY-ism surrounding them has gently abated. Georgia, where I now live, is currently experiencing this problem with the planned expansion of an existing nuclear plant mired in overruns and bankruptcy. That this significant roadblock to increased US generation doesn't come up in a serious oversight. Generally skeptical of overheated environmental activism, I wanted Pandora's Promise to be better than it is. Stone's film is hardly the final word on nuclear energy, but the beginning of a more muddled investigation that makes things less hopeful than he would present them. C+
When Stone is using experts to make his points, Pandora's Promise is a compelling feature-length episode of Frontline. The more cinematic aspects, reminiscent of the Michael Moore school of documentaries, devalue the scholarly efforts that have come before while still being mostly entertaining. In what seems to be a frivolous excuse to globe-hop, Stone goes from location to location, popping up on camera to show the reading on a Geiger counter. In baldly-unscientific but amusing comparisons, he shows that a pristine Brazilian beach that's believed to have healing powers is bathing in a little less radiation than the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. It's around the famous Ukrainian disaster site that Stone is the most frustratingly flip. He briefly interviews a family who flaunted the rules and moved back in shortly after the incident. They say everything's fine, so everything must be fine. He acknowledges the deaths that occurred as an immediate result, but shrugs when talking about the increased cancer incidence amongst those who were living nearby. Why Stone felt the need to transition to anecdote where he had been using data is a disappointing turn.
What doesn't come up in Pandora's Promise is the nigh-insurmountable cost of building nuclear plants, even as the long-held NIMBY-ism surrounding them has gently abated. Georgia, where I now live, is currently experiencing this problem with the planned expansion of an existing nuclear plant mired in overruns and bankruptcy. That this significant roadblock to increased US generation doesn't come up in a serious oversight. Generally skeptical of overheated environmental activism, I wanted Pandora's Promise to be better than it is. Stone's film is hardly the final word on nuclear energy, but the beginning of a more muddled investigation that makes things less hopeful than he would present them. C+
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