This Changes Everything Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

This Changes Everything Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 17, 2016

If there’s any good news about climate change and the tendency of some people to adopt an “ignorance is bliss” attitude regarding the phenomenon, it’s that burying one’s head in the sand may become decidedly easier in at least some regions made barren and parched by various weather anomalies. That cheeky comment aside, This Changes Everything actually does manage to posit at least a glimmer of hope in efforts to fight back against decades (perhaps even centuries) of boneheaded assaults against Mother Nature. In Naomi Klein’s formulation, first offered in her book of the same title as this documentary, “it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature”, a history of human "pranks" that may have led this particular matriarch to fight back. One of Klein’s theses is that scientists of yore (specifically those tied to the Royal Society of England in the 17th century) saw nature as a “beast to be tamed”, leading to all sorts of ultimate calamities. Now with that beast in what might be termed “The Revenant bear mode” Klein, who appears on screen here as a “tour guide” of sorts while also offering copious narration, offers a handful of stories scattered around the globe which initially might seem hopeless.

Those who got their fill of apocalyptic doom and gloom in An Inconvenient Truth may feel like they’ve seen and heard enough about this particular issue, but This Changes Everything works as a kind of post-Al Gore accounting of how various people are reacting around the planet to the incipient threat of climate change. It’s that element that ultimately gives this documentary its particular and perhaps unexpectedly hopeful ambience. While several of the vignettes offer some fairly horrifying examples of Man's evident stupidity in attacking the environment, there's a sense throughout this piece that enough people are in fact pulling their heads out of the sand to perhaps finally make a difference.

This Changes Everything Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

This Changes Everything is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Video Service Corporation with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. A lot of this documentary's contemporary interview footage is appealingly sharp, though there are some slight gradations in overall quality from location to location. There is also quite a bit of various archival footage at play, and that understandably runs a much wider gamut of quality, with some elements like relatively recent television broadcasts looking quite good, while other, older material can assume a pretty ragged ambience which includes elements like ghosting and other video anomalies.

This Changes Everything Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

This Changes Everything's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track tends to most effectively utilize the side and rear channels for the rather appealing score by David Wall and Adam B. White, cues which often assume a kind of effulgent, synth pad-based, quality that spreads quite nicely throughout the surrounds. Otherwise, Klein's narration and/or onscreen appearances, as well as other talking head sequences, understandably offer less surround activity but equally excellent fidelity.

This Changes Everything Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2:22)


• Deleted Scenes include:

  Climate Debt (1080p; 2:52)

  I Couldn't Look at It (1080p; 2:07)

  The Message (1080p; 1:45)

  Idle No More (1080p; 1:51)

  Arundhati Roy (1080p; 7:14)

  We Need a Battle of Ideas (1080p; 4:15)

  We Just Need to Find Each Other (1080p; 2:39)

  Let's Enjoy the Limits (1080p; 2:04)

  Extractivism (1080p; 1:32)

  Wake Up Call (1080p; 7:21)

  WTO vs. the Climate (1080p; 3:13)

  Solar Warriors (1080p; 3:25)

  Hole in My Country (1080p; 4:00)

  Overburden (1080p; 2:56)

  Let the Dead Rest (1080p; 1:46)

• Interview (1080p; 35:26) features Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis and (kind of weirdly) Alfonso Cuaron.

Note: This has been packaged in recycled cardboard (including a slipcover) for the ecologically minded.

This Changes Everything Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

A couple of the stories here involve various Native American (not necessarily United States American, by the way) tribes and their travails with various industries interloping on sacred land, and it's here that This Changes Everything will probably whip up the most potent emotion and maybe even outrage. But what's so commendable about this documentary is how it actually gets beyond the anger to posit at least a bit of hope at the hands of a growing number of activists. With an understanding that this is a documentary cobbled together from a variety of sources, video is fine and audio is as well. Recommended.