An Inconvenient Truth - Paramount Classics, Participant Productions, 2006. Directed by Davis Gugghenheim.
Click to watch trailer
I thought I’d do something a little bit different for this one. Actually it’s going to be the same except this is the first documentary trailer that I’m reviewing. Documentary films just like fictitious films have to rely on the strength of their material. The difference is that usually documentaries aren’t going to have cool visual effects, action and generally any sort of flashy material. Documentaries have to rely on the information they’re trying to convey, picking and choosing the bits that most effectively tell the audience what the movie is about in two minutes or so.
This trailer is kind of funny/interesting because it’s actually edited like a non-documentary film trailer, and I know that I for one really wanted to see the movie after seeing this trailer.
Story – The Earth’s climate is changing, ice is melting in places it shouldn’t be melting, we have to do something about it.
Editing & Music – So like I said, this is edited like it was a non-documentary film trailer. So what does that actually mean? Trailers of any kind are going to have dramatic music, probably cool motion graphics and snippets of dialogue that are punchy and get their point made very quickly. One thing that not a lot of documentary trailers have is sound effects. Sound effects are everything from dramatic hits, whooshes, swishes, drones and such.
The direction they went for in this trailer really was kind of like “make it like a horror movie.” For example this trailer starts with some dramatic text with big booming sound effects and then some whooshes into lightning sounds and more dramatic hits for its text. Really you could replace the shots in this opening bit and replace it with horror movie shots, and it would still work perfectly.
Al Gore’s first bit of dialogue ends on the year 2005 with a low bassy hit on 2005 then more dramatic sound effects into the next bit of text. The next montage of images enters with some light music, and from here it lets the material speak for itself as Al Gore shows slides of melting ice caps all over the world. This segment ends with a weather radar map, and then goes into another dramatic flashy montage of Hurricane Katrina which ends on the text “OR DID WE BETRAY THE PLANET?” which has a drone sound effect underneath it. The bit of Al Gore talking about preparing for threats also has the flashy time lapse desert footage that looks like it could be a special effect in any other movie.
After that begins the narration with “From Paramount Classics” which starts the big dramatic swelling music that takes us to the end. The music works really well with the montage of rising sea levels all over the world culminating with the contrast between what happened during Katrina and what would inevitably far far worse if it happened all over the world. The last bit is “NOTHING IS SCARIER… THAN THE TRUTH” which caps off the whole horror movie trailer style thing.
Selling Points – Documentaries are different because they aren’t out there to make money. Certainly they want to make their money back, but there was a saying I heard often in film school that the surest way to get poor was to make a documentary. Not to say that there haven’t been profitable documentaries, but this trailer like all documentary trailers is giving you a slice of what their bigger picture is hoping you want to hear more about it. This one jazzes it up more making it very dramatic trying to get you almost excited to see it.
Final Thoughts – This trailer did absolutely make me want to see this film, and it worked on me 100%. Though in retrospect it seems at times rather silly how seriously this trailer takes itself. Not that climate change isn’t a serious issue, but it’s certainly amusing to see a documentary trailer edited like a non-documentary trailer.
