I guess I’m not really sure I knew what this was about, but when it came out, I honestly had no interest in seeing it. I was surfing last night, however, and it was making its “network premier” so I started watching it. My husband came home and I stopped, but after the first 20 minutes, I was totally hooked. I TiVo’d it and finished watching it today.

I heartily recommend this to any aspiring, current, or iffy environmentalist. And to everyone else besides. If you’re serious about it, you’ll see An Inconvenient Truth first. Inconvenient is gripping because of the truths involved. It draws you in by presenting the facts, scary as they are, and the science behind global climate change. Tomorrow is much more Hollywood. By that I mean there’s science involved, and much of it the same as in Inconvenient but the way it draws you in is by gripping you with the storyline and with sympathetic characters. I say “if you’re serious about it” you’ll watch Gore’s movie before Fox’s because Inconvenient lays the scientific groundwork for many of the major plot points in Tomorrow. If you don’t know that this, in fact, based in reality, it’s a lot easier to watch it in the same way that one watches a scary movie. When I watch Scream (a personal fav), there’s a lot jumping out of my skin, a lot of pulse-racing, and a lot of adrenaline. But at the end of the movie, I turn off my TV. When I watched Tomorrow, I couldn’t really turn it off, because if I did, I’d go from tornados in LA to…gusts of up to 24mph, from melting ice caps to, well to melting ice caps. It’s a lot scarier when you can’t turn it off. And not scary in a good way.

Spoilers follow. The general story is of Jack Hall (a fantastic-as-always Dennis Quaid), a paleoclimatologist who has this freaky theory about how the last ice age started (hint: it got warmer). This is where science from Inconvenient comes in. His theory is that melt water from the ice caps will change the ocean currents that keep most of life on earth alive. In Tomorrow this is mentioned sort of in passing, and then referred to vaguely throughout. Inconvenient goes a little more in-depth with the science behind it. So if you haven’t seen Inconvenient, it’d be easier to turn off. He predicts another ice age and lo! he gets one. What follows is his trip through ice & snow to get his son (Donnie of Donnie Darko if you’ve seen it, and if you haven’t, do), currently burning books to keep warm in a snowed-in New York library. He gets his son, his wife (who I honestly thought was his ex-wife at the beginning) saves the little cancer boy from freezing, leaving him to get ongoing treatment in Mexico, which I’m not certain is better, and his son gets the girl. Everyone who didn’t die lives happily ever after.

But like I said, the science behind the Hollywoodization of global climate change is real. And biking to TJ’s today was a cold and wind-swept experience. Santa Anas I can deal with‚Äîthey’re just f??n. Frigid air battering my door & windows is slightly creepier, especially after watching Tomorrow’s tornados.