Very well executed

Good start, but then it gets ruined

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The first half hour of the film is wasted on a persistent urban legend - that backyard inventors developed a 100-mile-per-gallon carburetor 50 years ago that was bought up and suppressed by the multinational oil companies. If such an invention really worked, the auto industry would have developed and commercialized it to increase the market appeal of their vehicles and reduce tailpipe pollution. There would have been no way the oil industry could have prevented it. Conclusion: the 100-mpg carburetor (installed on a heavy old clunker of a vehicle) is a hoax. More believable documentation than the reminiscences and speculations of some old tinkerers is absent from the film because such documentation - independent successful test results, substantive assessments by real experts on engine efficiency, etc. - does not exist.From that inauspicious beginning, the film goes on to prove that the oil industry is ruthless, profit-maximizing, and indifferent to the interests of consumers. All granted. The same is true of huge corporations in general. Belaboring the point is simply boring. The lengthy scenes of Congressional hearings were predictable, uninformative, irrelevant, and tedious.The worst fault of the film is that its main thrust is untrue: that solving America's oil addiction is mainly a matter of overcoming political opposition and will be relatively cheap and easy once we get the evil oil corporations under control. The film omitted the critical fact that for biofuels to replace fossil petroleum would require all of the arable land in the US and more. We would have to shift our agricultural economy entirely from food to fuel, and even that wouldn't come close to doing the job. Hydrogen was given a fleeting mention, but the film omitted the fact that producing H2 requires a large amount of energy. Germany did not use hydrogen in vehicles in WW2, as one non-expert spokesperson said in the film; it used liquid fuels synthesized from coal at great economic and environmental cost. It would have been easy for the filmmakers to check this fact and omit the hydrogen enthusiast's misstatement from the film, but they didn't bother to do so. There is a solid reason fossil petroleum has dominated our transportation economy for a century. It is cheap, energy-dense, transportable, and convenient. When it runs out, there will be massive economic dislocation and worsening international conflicts. Worldwide energy use will have to decline precipitously, and fanciful carburetors installed in SUVs will not comprise any part of the solution.Do not waste your time watching this film; "The End of Suburbia" is much more informative and scientifically well-documented.

The documentary raises valid concerns. The presentation seemed inspired by a Michael Moore style, and certainly it does not live up to that: namely use of clips from other movies to convey a similar situation. Nevertheless, it brings about issues often missed in the debate over Peak Oil. The most interesting part was the history of Standard Oil, specifically the fact that the actual dissolution of the company brought them more profits! Also, one gets real sense of problems when one sees reactions from ordinary people. Watch if you ever had a concern for gasoline prices.

I am both fascinated and infuriated by the subject matter and I appreciate any effort to draw attention to the issue and expose the greedy Big Oil executives, but I thought this was just poorly done. Very amateurish. It felt like they spliced together a bunch of the same clips and used lame old cartoons to make jokes and get their points across. It almost reminded me, quality-wise, of a video I made in college using Windows Movie Maker in which I pretty much just mashed up a bunch of different YouTube videos. It did not feel very tightly focused, and it was very repetitive. Still need to check out Gasland, which I'm sure is better.

If we start with a complete lie about 100 mpg, this movie started as an epic failure. The fact is that the US economy is completely dependent on oil and there's nothing, absolutely no way out. As expensive as it is, it's the cheapest energy source and will be for 50 years (until it is gone).The United States government can continue to support dictatorships which keep the price of oil a little bit lower, but the motivation for such action is pure greed. The United States pulled out of the Libyan war very quickly and not for any noble reason. The republicans pulled a paper tiger out of their butt saying that Obama started an illegal war. When they first arrest Dubya, then I'll start listening. Otherwise, talk to the hand. Republicans whine about some illegal war because it's 'bad for business' (drives up the price of oil).