You know the script by now: it’s a documentary, with a campaign attached, about an environmental problem, ideally with a Hollywood voiceover and the simple (or simplistic) message that humans are screwing up the planet. If we don’t Do Something very soon, it will be too late and we’ll simply have to repent at our leisure while disaster befalls us.
We’ve had An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s tendentious Powerpoint presentation about global warming (ex-vice president Gore is as good as Hollywood for these purposes); we’ve had The Eleventh Hour, co-written and fronted by Hollywood A-lister Leonardo DiCaprio; then there was A Crude Awakening, which lacked the Hollywood razzmatazz, but spiced things up by adding the threat of resource war to the prospect of civilisation slamming into a brick wall called ‘Peak Oil’ (see A fit of peak, by Rob Lyons).
Now, we have The End of the Line, a film version of Daily Telegraph journalist Charles Clover’s book about the threat to the world’s oceans and future food supplies from overfishing. It opens with shots of a colourful ocean scene, while Ted Danson delivers a portentous voiceover about how these fish are lucky to be ‘protected from the most efficient predator the oceans have every known’. No prizes for guessing that he ain’t talking about Jaws; he’s talking about us.