In the latest Captain Planet effort, Earth Days is more like watching a screen saver on your computer of historical errors then a political statement. It’s not a bad film; it’s just lacking that “what we do next” phase. Directed by Robert Stone, the documentary serves more of a lesson then an actual movement towards environmental change.

Within the first five minutes of the film, the audience is introduced to its narrators. There’s The Conservationist (Stewart Udall), The Forecaster (Dennis Meadows), The Politician (Pete McCloskey), The Organizer (Dennis Hayes), The Radical (Stephanie Mills), The Astronaut (Rusty Schweickart), The Biologist (Paul Ehrlich) and The Encourager (Hunter Lovins). Throughout most of the film, if it weren’t for the subtitles, there is almost no way to tell who is narrating what section of the film.

The film certainly takes an interesting narration, starting from a Leave It To Beaver-esqe montage of America after the Great Depression to eventually showing images of a mushroom cloud engulfing the land. These images have McCloskey, the politician, saying “Human extinction, for the first time, is in human grasp.” How did we get to this point? How did we get to a world that has to shut down high school baseball games because of the dense amount of fog? Or kill off all of the butterflies that biologist Ehrlich was studying?

Mainly, however, the focus is on the 1970s and the environmental movement. While the era wasn’t exactly the pro-commune movement that it was advertised as 30+ years ago, it does mirror the Green movement of our generation. You don’t have to be a hippie to want to help the Earth, which was the message of the first Earth Day, featured in the film.

The two most striking observations in the film came from two of the narrators. The first was with The Radical, Stephanie Mills, giving her commencement speech at graduation. Not only did she declare that she would never have children (and eventually followed through on that), but she also questioned whether she “would have to become a cannibal” in the future because of the exponential rise in Earth’s population. The second involved scientist Stewart Brand building a 10,000-year clock inside of the mountainside of Nevada to expand our perception of time. How does that even make sense? No one alive today will even be around to perceive anything! And if what the scientists are saying is true, then there won’t even be an Earth in 10,000 years.

Excuse me if I’m getting too Al Gore on you, but Earth Days opens your eyes to the injustice done to the world everyday by humans. While it’s not anything that most people don’t know today, it is a documentary that should be shown in every Biology and Ecology 101 class, maybe even starting from middle school. While Earth Days isn’t exactly An Inconvenient Truth, it does manage to stir up debate in an area that needs to be addressed sooner rather then later. The film holds the old adage true that if you don’t learn from the past, you are doomed to make the same mistakes. As you see the images of school children eating a picnic and swimming in a pool, all while being blasted with pesticides such as DDT, it’s shocking to realize how stupid people really are. Not taking that extra step to help our planet is basically doing the equivalent of the non-action of the ’60s and ’70s. We don’t need a “temporary Band-Aid,” (where is this quote from?) but instead need to think of everyday as Earth Day.

Earth Days will be playing at Cornell Cinema at the Willard Straight Hall Theater on Saturday, Oct. 17 at 9:15 p.m. Tickets are $4 for students.