Considering Oliver Stone’s track record of jumping into political controversy with his own work (Platoon, JFK, Snowden), how sober is his approach to his new documentary, Nuclear Now. is perhaps surprising. What’s even more surprising is that the film’s measured tone lends its visceral power. to provide an antidote to the climate fatalism that many viewers have probably felt over the last few years.
The film is an important counter-argument to the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, examining both the past and the future of nuclear power by presenting simple facts about the worsening climate change situation. , makes a compelling case for nuclear power as follows: It is the most rational and practical source of energy that can help us face the crisis.
Stone, who wrote and narrated the film alongside Joshua Goldstein, knows the recognition he faces. The first half of the documentary grapples with the enduring fear that the propulsion of nuclear weapons is struggling to uncover. This is the result of several snowballing factors, some snowballing together, such as the link between nuclear power and nuclear warfare, and the exceptional disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986. The film claims that there is power plants, and in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
A later section on innovations and obstacles to future applications of nuclear energy turns somewhat weedy. But the distaste for formal or rhetorical bombast in films discussing the hopes of scientists for a better future is a balm in itself. We’re staring at catastrophe, Stone explains nonchalantly, but our greatest tools are already in our hands.
Nuclear Now
Unrated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. at the theater.
