Gore brings a warning: It’s getting hot out there

“AN Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary about global warming, is being marketed as “the most terrifying film you will ever see.” And indeed the message, delivered by Al Gore, is scary: We have just 10 years to clean up our acts before the Earth’s climate system falls into a tailspin of epic destruction.

The film -- which opens in Los Angeles and New York on May 24 -- is based on a slide show Gore has been giving to audiences since 1990. After environmentalist Laurie David and movie producer Lawrence Bender saw the presentation in Los Angeles early last year, “We were all convinced that the moving truth of what Gore was demonstrating needed to be experienced on a much larger scale,” Bender says.

They quickly put together a creative team that included director Davis Guggenheim, “Got Milk?” mastermind Scott Z. Burns and Participant Productions founder Jeff Skoll. They set up a meeting with Gore in San Francisco, where they asked if he would be interested in making a documentary.

Gore jokes: “They had me at hello.” But he had one request: He wanted the film to include scientific data -- lots of it. They agreed, and Guggenheim went to work crafting a movie that was packed with facts about global warming, while also painting an intimate portrait of Gore.

“It has a few lapses of mise-en-scene,” New Yorker Editor David Remnick wrote recently in a “Talk of the Town” column. But as a means of education, Remnick said, the movie is a “brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide.”

-- Tina Daunt