If sad, depressive news spurs you into action, Crude Impact is the film for you.

Watch this for a tireless, relentless look at oil wars and the politics fueling them, oil-related ecological and environmental disasters, oil-related cancer and health risks, and of course, oil-caused global warming.

Sure, the film’s informative — if you’ve been living under a rock. If you’ve been blithely going about your gas-guzzling way, perhaps this depressive film is exactly what you need to bring you down to the crude reality of your actions. But if you’re at least vaguely aware that your purchase at the gas pump’s probably not the best thing, you’ll find this film more than a bit overhanded.

On the upside: About 25 minutes the film, we get the first glimpses of opimism — a little late, considering the film’s just 30 mins long in the cut-down, Ironweed Films version I got. Apparently, the director cut it down because he’s selling the full-length version through his website.

In these last few minutes, Crude Impact throws out a whole bunch of varied ideas, kicking things off easy with the need to educate women in poverty-ridden areas to reduce population growth. Important work, but work that seems very much removed from, and difficult to contribute to, for many people watching this film.

We then get to easier changes, like swiching out to CFL bulbs or opting for Community Supported Agriculgure (CSA). This part’s somewhat heartwarming, but also somewhat incongruous with the rest of the film and its apocalyptic message of global warfare and environmental destruction. The CFL recommendation at the end of An Inconvenient Truth has been similarly critiqued, but because Crude Impact is so much more heavy handed, the gap between the enormity of the problem and the relative insignificance of recommended action appears much wider and near-impossible to bridge here –

Perhaps it’s simply that Crude Impact seems dated — though the film was released just last year. The “doom and gloom” of the fact of global warming is now accepted as, well, fact — even by Fox News. We’re now at the transition stage — How do we use this doom and gloom knowledge on a meaningful scale to create a different future? Films that answer this question effectively, I think, are the ones that’re more relevant and useful now.

Ironweed Films included Crude Impact — along with Blue Vinyl, a film I really enjoyed — in its April DVD mailing. Note to Ironweed: If a film included’s a severely abridged version, please note it as such in the packaging. Otherwise, it looks like you hacked up the film, Blockbuster-censorship style –

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