Collapse - 4/1/11

A horror film unlike any other.

No ghosts, no blood, no guts, no zombies, no vampires, no serial killers...

Well, there are the ghosts of those who have warned us.

There is the bloodshed to come.

The guts on display are of the courage type.

Zombies and vampires are killers that none of us really believe in but there are other unbelievable sources of death on show here.

Serial killers?  Our governments.

This is  82 minutes in the company of Michael Ruppert; former LAPD officer turned peak oil theorist.  Described as "batshit insane" by some and dismissed as a prophet of doom by others what isn't in question is that Ruppert sees an unavoidable future for mankind; and it isn't pretty.

Peak oil theory is the theory that at some point, a point we may well have passed, the amount of oil we can produce will fall into terminal decline...when one considers that everything from our toothpaste to our toothbrush is made from oil, that the food in our supermarkets gets there thanks to oil and is grown with pesticides made from oil then the idea of a world without enough oil is a frightening one.

At times during Rupperts incredible monologue I felt genuinely fearful.  My stomach was churning and my own consumerism made me sick.  As his initial rage and prophecies of doom subside they are replaced by an even more terrifying onscreen collapse from Ruppert...a man clearly burdened by what he perceives to be more than just an inconvenient truth.  There are, of course, counter-arguments to what Ruppert and the other peak oilers say but what isn't up for debate is the power of "Collapse" to invoke terror into the viewer.