We the People 2.0

We the People 2.0 confronts its viewers with the ravages of mine tailings and leaky containment ponds, of sludge and ooze and grue, all of which, the film documents, are killing people, particularly in the cancer-blighted small towns of North America. The film's brief is laudable: Alongside documenting grassroots activism, including the kayak flotillas that protested Shell Oil in Seattle, the film focuses on legal challenges presented to corporations by granting rights to ecosystems. Talking heads come from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that helps small towns draft laws against fracking, factory farming, and water privatization. The voice of narrator Walton Goggins, formerly of TV's rural meth-opera "Justified," is a great boon to the film, perhaps making viewers wish he would just let it rip in the grandiloquent manner of his TV character Boyd Crowder. The "2.0" in the title refers to what the filmmakers have dubbed "The Second American Revolution" - a battle not against a foreign power, but against corporate power. (Seattle International Film Festival)