Collapse: 4 Stars from Eye Weekly

published at Eye Weekly

COLLAPSE

by Jason Anderson
December 9, 2009

Editorial Rating: ****

Just because Michael Ruppert sometimes comes off as a paranoid crank doesn’t mean he’s not right about where our civilization is heading. That’s why Collapse is a far more terrifying piece of disaster porn than Roland Emmerich could ever concoct.

The director of American Movie and The Yes Men, Chris Smith encountered Ruppert while researching a documentary about the CIA’s involvement with drug smuggling in the ’80s. Ruppert had been a decorated LA cop whose own efforts to expose the CIA’s nefarious doings prompted his further investigations into “how the world really works.” According to the facts, theories and opinions that Ruppert lays out before the camera in Collapse, the repercussions of the globe’s dwindling oil supplies have already begun to manifest. Moreover, things are bound to get a whole lot worse as our belief in infinite growth collides with the fact of finite resources.

The film’s dispassionate, Errol Morris–like presentation of Ruppert’s ideas about energy, economics and the end times makes them all the more disturbing. Suggestions of the personal cost of Ruppert’s quest for knowledge add a haunting quality to Smith’s compelling portrait of an angry, chain-smoking Cassandra whose curse is to see what so many of us prefer to ignore.