Directed by Chris Smith, Collapse is a film documenting the life of Michael Rupert, a controversial independent journalist.
Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer has authored boots on the vents of the September 11 attacks and predicted the Wall Street debacle of 2008 several years before it happened, at a time when most analysts were forecasting infinite growth for the stock market and investment banks. He describes himself as an investigative reporter and a radical thinker while critics call him a conspiracy theorist and an alarmist.
The title refers to Ruppert’s belief that unsustainable energy and financial policies have led to an on-going collapse of modern industrial civilization.
Director Smith interviewed Ruppert over the course of fourteen hours in an interrogation-like setting in an abandoned warehouse basement meat locker near downtown Los Angeles. Ruppert’s interview was shot over five days throughout March and April 2009. The filmmakers distilled these interviews down to this 82 minute monologue with archival footage interspersed as illustration. The bulk of the film presents Ruppert making an array of predictions including social unrest, violence, population dislocation and governmental collapses in the United States and throughout the world.
The American activist is on a mission to expose the “peak oil” cover-up: that is, the authorities’ reluctance to prepare us for what happens when an ever increasing energy demand to feed a growth-based economy meets the point at which the energy supply can no longer be grown to keep up. At that point, price volatility causes our fragile and corrupt financial system to trip up as people and businesses struggle to pay their fuel bills. He also believes that government authorities controlled the sale of drugs in the inner cities.
He explains we live on a finite planet which will always overcome a financial paradigm. He speaks with passion, assertiveness and knowledge.
Smith said “What I hoped to reveal was…that his obsession with the collapse of industrial civilization has led to the collapse of his life. In the end, it is a character study about his obsession.”
The Onion’s AV Club wrote that “in several immensely poignant moments, we can also see an angry, lonely, vulnerable man whose life epitomizes the title as much as the globe does. There are many layers to the man and the movie, and I for one left the theatre shaken.”
Roger Ebert wrote, “I don’t know when I’ve seen a thriller more frightening. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen. “Collapse” is even entertaining, in a macabre sense. I think you owe it to yourself to see it.”
This is a controversial documentary which will guarantee to take up residence in your mind.
