That's the basic message of Planet of the Humans. Like me, other reviewers have wondered What the Hey? Why is Gibbs, alleging to be an environmentalist, doing everything he can to make all sorts of environmental action and clean technology look as bad as possible?
After you finish reading my review, I suggest this one at the website Films For Action. And if you're interested in seeing a documentary which actually shows some of the good that environmentalists are doing, I suggest Jamie Redford's Happening: A Clean Energy Revolution. (But be warned! Redford's documentary is NOT PERFECT!!!!! All it does it show people making a difference, encouraging the viewer to make a difference.)
The movie is mostly divided between telling us things we already know, and focusing on a flaw in an otherwise-good thing or helpful person or entity -- which can be regarded as more telling us what we already know, for those of us who have already grasped that nothing is perfect. It is not news that corn-based ethanol is flat-out a failure from an environmental point of view. Switchgrass-based ethanol is much cleaner -- oh, but it's not in Gibbs' film, is it? It is not news that an electric vehicle can get its electricity from a grid which is powered by coal. However, it seems that many people still have not grasped that, even if it gets its electricity from coal, an electric vehicle will still be cleaner, overall, than an internal-combustion vehicle. And if they didn't know that already, they also didn't learn it from Gibbs' movie. And of course, if an electric vehicle gets its electricity from solar or wind, it is much cleaner still. And many of the people who drive electric vehicles also advocate for solar and wind and other types of clean energy, have solar panels on their roofs and so forth.
Gibbs shows protesters in Vermont hiking to the top of a mountain to protest plans to put wind turbines on the mountaintop. He films one of the protesters comparing wind turbines on top of this mountain to entire mountaintops having been removed in other parts of the country in the process of strip-mining coal -- and he ends that scene there, as if that were a valid comparison. I think that if he had dug a little deeper, he might have been able to show that the wind turbines planned for the Vermont mountaintop would be a wee bit more environmentally-friendly than coal mining with mountaintop removal in Appalachia.
But he doesn't seem interested in showing any upside to anything or anyone in the alternative-energy sector. Al Gore sold his cable TV network to Al Jazeera, a company which owns stock in oil interests -- and so, Gibbs implies, all of Gore's efforts on behalf on the environment are therewith exposed as -- you know, we've heard this sort of thing before. But usually, we don't hear it from environmentalists, we hear it from Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or some other oil-funded right-wing idiots who are trying to discredit the entire environmental movement.
What exactly is Gibbs trying to do?
There are some environmentalists who hate people, and want the human race to die out as quickly as possible, for the alleged good of the rest of the planet. The only way I can make sense of Planet of the Humans, which begins with a montage of Folks on the Street Answering the Question: How much longer will humanity survive? -- is if Gibbs is one of that humanity-hating type of environmentalist.
Some right-wingers and proponents of petrochemical and nuclear power also seem to like Planet of the Humans, since it does what they do: trash environmentalists, supposedly "expose" us by concentrating on our real and imagined flaws, ignore what we're actually getting right. Screw you, Jeff Gibbs! The Wrong Monkey might love you, but he loves everybody. I don't.
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