The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced in 2007 that we have until 2015 to stop world temperatures from rising at their current rates... or else. Photo: Spanner Films

ROBERT POWERS

Spoiler alert: we're all going to die. Well, to put it more accurately: all of human civilization is going to die.

It's going to happen well before we ever see the 22nd century, and it's going to be entirely our own fault, and there's more than enough blame to go around. Apparently, we're dead-set in our habits of consuming more than we conserve in our day-to-day routines. Meanwhile, our governments are too busy chasing pots of black gold at the end of missile-trajectory rainbows in the Middle East and Africa to enforce genuine economic and environmental reforms that have the power to prevent our extinction. So, great job, everyone.

"We could have saved ourselves, but we didn't. It's amazing," deadpans British actor Pete Postlethwaite in director Franny Armstrong's The Age of Stupid. "What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off?" he asks.

The movie, which premiered worldwide in late September, was the featured attraction of yesterday's Greening the Beige "Mini Green Film Fest" (www.greeningthebeige.org) at the Cable 8 Creative Cultural Center in the CBD.

The year is 2055 and a towering superstructure somewhere in the Arctic (now mostly rocky islands instead of permafrost and seasonal glaciers) is where all of the world's remaining cultural artifacts of significance are housed, along with two of every species of animal and innumerable servers hosting all of the data ever amassed by mankind. Outside, the world is a miserable wasteland, and it's only a matter of time before we're all dead and Earth becomes a graveyard. Again, great job.

Postlethwaite plays a lone archivist at this Great Library of the future, and we see him bring up a computer display to nostalgically peruse various documentary videos of what life was like in the year 2009. He watches and records his thoughts for a message to be beamed into space, a "cautionary tale… for whoever, or whatever, eventually finds this recording."

"I find it surprising, that after so much effort, the final act of our existence should be suicide," he says, equating a misuse of resources on a global scale with humanity snuffing itself out.

So what exactly is director Armstrong's basic premise? You are not living in the Computer Age or the Age of Information, and you are not part of the "Greatest Gen-eration," Generation X, Y, Z, Next, whatever. You are living in an Age of Stupidity and the past hundred years has seen generation after generation of stupid people stupidly eviscerating the planet's ecosphere. And if you dispute that, you are ei-ther lying, or incurably stupid.

In one segment, the film states that if real and innovative changes are not made right now to the ways we're currently managing and mis-managing resources worldwide, as early as 2015 our death-march towards oblivion will be unavoidable.

So, instead of sitting and twiddling your thumbs why the rest of us stupidly wait for Rome to start burning, why not make the best of the time you have left and learn to play the fiddle? Better yet, why not head on down to your local megaplex to catch yourself a screening of Roland Emmerich's latest helping of apocalypse porn, 2012?

If mankind's day in the sun truly is on the verge of expiring for good, then you might as well go out the way that got you there: apathetically.

www.ageofstupid.net