Burning the Future: Coal in America | Review

Commencing what will most likely be a lengthy, U.S city theatrical run and educational tour, this small environmental documentary follows in the footsteps of Paul Thomas Anderson’s exposé on the motivating forces behind greed, and is being released at the same time as Laura Dunn’s docu film on the changing scapes of the land and ecological imbalances. David Novack’s Burning the future: Coal in America exposes how the government and the coal industry sleep in the same bed, how the industry literally de-roots the lives of the surrounding inhabitants all in the name of profit and being good neighbors to the rest of the nation and is emblematic of how we are treating the planet as a disposal piece of waste.

There is something fishy in the water – but it ain’t the fish, cause the fish are dead. An informative and all-encompassing docu film that addresses the coal question head-on will leave many renewable energy enthusiasts and practitioners perplexed – how come this practice is still common place? The short answer is China, India and other parts of the U.S, but this is meaningless to people who just want regular looking ice cubes for their lemonade. Those pieces of black nuggets that coalminers see as romantic notions of what Noah left them as gifts are still burning holes into the atmosphere and contaminating nature’s water supply not because West Virginia is Hillbilly territory – but because large corporations and the government know entirely too well that legal maneuvering creates profitable delays in action.

Set amongst a community where the local school is mind-boggling adjacent to a mining facility, Novack sets out to explore the entire ‘move mountains’ process of digging out the coal and then relating this back to how ordinary folk charge up their cellphones. For the most part, this is a talking heads docu-film with people from both camps: we have those who have a “Bush heart Coal” bumper sticker among their collectables and those who have no voice but attempt to use it anyways which is best exemplified with what better than a ticked-off coal miner’s daughter.

Unfortunately, the final resting stop – a montage of images of New York City’s Times Square intermixed with the series of Appalachian mining images and brown-colored glasses of water doesn’t have desired ‘what will you do now effect’, but then again, neither did An Inconvenient Truth. The low budget documentary won’t have a chance to compete with large scale social change films, but it is ultimately part of a new trend of socially relevant docus that explore man’s relationship with mother earth and convincingly take aim at one specific industry that has about as much environmental impact as those gas guzzling vehicles that Americans are so dependent on.

Rating 2.5 stars