Movie Review #1: Evaluating the 'Human Footprint'

      The "Human Footprint" is a documentary made by National Geographic to demonstrate the resources the average US citizen consumes in their lifetime. The film set out to show Americans the effects our consumer lifestyles have on the planet. The premise is to take typical items used in everyday life, such as milk cartons or hair products, and lay the amount used in an average lifetime in a single camera shot. While the impact of seeing the sheer volume of waste is undeniable, I felt like this film could have been much more galvanizing if more attention had been paid to finding solutions to the growing materialism in our world.
     Watching the film, I felt like it did a great job of pointing out our consumeristic pit falls but did so with an air of snooty superiority which greatly put me off as a viewer. This was especially demonstrated when the resources in question were necessities which have no substitution, such as showers. The producers would spend a great deal of time and witty narration building up to the reveal of said necessary resource, and then would present it in such a way that made me feel guilty for requiring it. While it doesn't seem like the intention of the film, it's almost impossible not to walk away feeling guilty for needing things like soap and medicine. It certainly doesn't serve their cause well.
    To be honest, I was a little confused as to what the message of the film was. It seemed like it was presenting itself as a piece of expository journalism when the concept would have worked better as an advocacy piece. It was kind of all over the place. On the one hand, it did an excellent job of making people realize how much waste one life can generate, but the format left some serious holes for the audience to stew over. The biggest of these was, what did they do with all the stuff after they arranged it? Was it donated? Or was it too wasted? It was a question that every person had on their lips when we were watching it in class. It seemed strange that a documentary that was potentially arguing for less waste didn't address what it did with the waste created in filming. It was also very unclear what their argument was. It seemed as though they were trying to present the images in an objective fashion, but the writing and the acting made the viewer feel as though they were combatively challenging the average American lifestyle.
    Overall I thought that it was an interesting concept, but it needed to be developed further. It became monotonous to just see mounds of resources after a short while. I believe that the was things were presented detracted from the film and their concept as a whole.