Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
Though primarily retired from traditional film narratives on which he first made his name on, the legendary director Oliver Stone whose works include such masterpieces as Salvador, Platoon, Talk Radio, Born On the Fourth of July, Wall Street, J.F.K., Nixon, Natural Born Killers, U-Turn and W. is far from finished talking about the things that pique his passions and curiosity. The Oscar-winning button-pusher has gradually over the years segued into the well-worn shoes of a documentarian, tackling the things out there that still resound and matter. His latest effort in that endeavor is the new documentary Nuclear which has recently premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. This being a Stone film, albeit a doc, naturally there is already more than a little controversy; as card-carrying admirers of the Heaven and Earth helmer we wouldn’t expect less…
Oliver Stone’s Nuclear is an impassioned 105 minute cry of a filmmaker for the respective world powers to eschew their scripted talking points and nebulous reasonings by abandoning a large chunk of the climate path they’re currently on in favor of investing in nuclear power as a realistic means to battle climate change, fossil fuels be damned.
Well aware of the shaky timing of the premiere of Nuclear with the ongoing war between the Ukraine and Russia, Stone still insists to anyone who will give him a listen (in this case our friends over at The Hollywood Reporter) that efforts need to be redoubled to get the U.S. and Russia to the peace table so that the existential crisis of climate change can be hashed out and worked on by all world powers in solidarity. For those who are all onboard the beating of the proverbial war drums, it’s a message they may not want to hear, which seems to add to Stone’s insistence that – for but a moment – they put down their devices and temper the rhetoric and actually listen to an idea that might run counter to the noise they’ve presumably signed up for.
“You can say the United States and Russia are at odds now and yes, it’s horrible and it’s wrong, but I’ve been saying from the beginning, as I did the Putin documentary, that there is no reason for the United States and Russia not to be partners,” explains Stone about his argument in Nuclear about a teaming-up of the two powers.
Nuclear is based partially on Joshua S. Goldstein’s book A Bright Future (co-written with nuclear engineer Staffan Qvist). Goldstein co-wrote the new doc with Stone and offers his own take on Stone’s theory of solidarity between contentious nations: “Of the whole film, there’s like 45 seconds in there where it says we should cooperate with Russia and China,” Goldstein says. “I talked with Oliver about that a few times. It’s obviously a very optimistic and very long-term vision, because it’s clear that sort of cooperation is not happening now.”
What is happening now in the interest of driving one narrarive over another is a distortion of the basic facts, insists Goldstein.
“I’m 69 years old and remember literally getting down under the desk in school to prepare for what to do in a nuclear attack…That is completely traumatizing. We were all, as the film talks about, traumatized by and afraid of the threat of nuclear weapons. But then it got applied to anything nuclear. And then the oil and gas industry saw the opportunity to make people afraid of a competitor. And then it took a life of its own,” Goldstein explained to The Hollywood Reporter.
At the end of the day, the last word goes to the man who has long had no issue with expressing his own opinions in the medium of film, Oliver Stone.
“This film is not about politics, it’s not political,” insists Stone. “The future of the human race is more important than all that bullshit.”
