Mark Reviews Movies: TO THE END

To the End, Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 8, 2022

It's a good thing this country—not to mention the world beyond it—has people like the ones featured in To the End in it. They're fighting a fight that needs to be fought—one that generations before theirs have largely ignored, because it's easier and more convenient to do so.

The problem is climate change, which has become an international crisis, whether everyone in the world is willing to accept that as fact or not. We can see its effects just by looking at, to name a few consequences, the massive increase in the number of wildfires in the west, the more significant power of tropical storms and hurricanes, and rising water levels leading to flooding in metropolitan areas.

Nothing was going to be done about any of this under the previous Presidential administration. It didn't matter how many scientists, organizations, and international research efforts could warn ordinary people and political leaders that changes were needed quickly, because the window for those changes to mean anything was closing just as a rapidly.

The last administration, its allies, and the political party that latched itself to it (apparently to a steady decline in that party that hadn't been seen since the last time one its members was elected as President) had their agendas. None of them involved addressing climate change, except, it seemed, to deny it as much of a problem.

That's where director Rachel Lears' documentary begins, under the previous administration and with the 2018 release of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report offered dire news, because that's the only kind of news human activity on the environment can actually be these days.

Climate change, namely the widespread warming of the planet, was still on track to cause more and more problems in a future through which some current generations and future generations would have to live. In order to limit the impact of that warming, great changes to society would have be made, and those changes would take a lot of political will to accomplish.

Here, then, are people with that kind of political ambition, know-how, and passion to, from the movie's perspective, save the day. Lears follows four of them with alternating degrees of focus. The key figure, perhaps, is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman who's among one of the few political stars we have in this country (Lears even followed the politician in the filmmaker's previous documentary). The only people who talk about her more than her fans are the people who despise her because of her views.

Rivaling her as the major focal point of the documentary is Alexandra Rojas, the head of a group called the Justice Democrats. That organization attempts to challenge less-effective elected officials in the Democratic Party by putting up people like Ocasio-Cortez in primary elections.

The focus on these two women, of course, gets at the IPCC's assertion that it will take political effort to make the changes necessary to combat or, at least, alleviate the effects of climate change in the near future. There's a lot of wheeling and dealing, as Ocasio-Cortez works to get a so-called "Green New Deal" passed through Congress and, with that bill failing to gain much traction among even members of her own party, Rojas working to defeat more moderate Democrats in Congress during the primaries of the 2020 election.

As for how this legislation and the electoral efforts to have a more favorable group of officials voting on it actually affect the environment, that's left between the lines of this documentary. To be sure, Lears also puts a spotlight on Varshini Prakash, a founder of the Sunrise Movement group that rallies around fighting climate change, and Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a policy writer in charge of putting together the Green New Deal.

Prakash and her organization seem to be the key component of the movie's narrative, as they meet to discuss tactics and protest in the halls of power (without any kind of force or violence, just in case some might forget that legitimately peaceful protest at and inside government buildings is an actual thing). They fade into the background as the political maneuvers, which last from 2019 until earlier this year, take over control of this story. As commanding a presence as Gunn-Wright may be with her no-nonsense way of talking within the stilted atmosphere of a policy discussion, she doesn't stand a chance, unfortunately, against Lears' fascination with and access to legislative drama and the allure of electoral politicking.

How climate change and the human-made factors causing it go deeper than the environment, brings up decades of economic and racial injustice, are matters the movie raises but simply doesn't make the effort to confront in a meaningful way. Instead, To the End gives us a semi-insider look at how legislation evolves, in-party fighting, and the road to a political victory—even if the movie doesn't even bother to explain how it actually is one.

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