Even in a season of apocalyptic films, these facts are really, really scary

Former L.A. narcotics detective turned whistle-blower turned radical critical thinker Michael Ruppert is probably not the kind of guy you would want to meet face-to-face in the basement of an abandoned meat-packing plant in Los Angeles. But that’s just where we encounter him in Collapse, an urgent and riveting new documentary from Chris Smith, one of America’s most intuitive and gifted young filmmakers.

Some would label Ruppert a conspiracy theorist. In Collapse, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall, he asserts that he deals in “conspiracy fact.” Whether you agree, disagree or fence-sit, there is no denying it: His notions about the impact of declining oil reserves and looming global catastrophe do not sound like ideas from the fringe, as they may have several years ago.

For well over two decades, Ruppert has proved himself a meticulous researcher. His work is widely consumed by government insiders and academics, as well as by conspiracy theorists. Drawing from newspaper inside pages, academic journals and unclassified documents, he has exposed various forms of government corruption as a freelance investigative journalist, lecturer, and, since 1993, publisher of his print and Web-based newsletter, From the Wilderness.

In Collapse, Ruppert connects the dots between peak oil, essential human services, alternate energy sources, agricultural production, governments, money interests and strategies for survival. All power points from his recent book, A Presidential Energy Policy, Ruppert delivers them in a plain-spoken vocabulary peppered with imaginative analogies. But this is not merely an activist doc intended to support Ruppert’s treatise. Smith gives us something much more: a subtle portrait of a man whose sense of duty has affected his personal life.

Globe and Mail