‘Plastic People’ Review: An Essential Documentary About How Plastic Is Literally Invading Us All
14.03.2024 - 03:25
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Plastic People” is one of those essential state-of-our-world documentaries. If and when it gets a release (it premiered this week at SXSW), I urge you to see it, to ponder its message, to consider what it’s saying about how microplastics — plastic particles that are less than 5mm in length, though the key ones may be microscopic — have invaded our food, our water, our air, and, quite specifically, our bodies. For decades, it’s been a trope of environmental filmmaking to showcase the ugliness of landfills, and to ask where all the plastic we throw out is ultimately going to go.
“Plastic People” has some of that. Yet its portrait of what plastic is doing to us is even more distressingly advanced. Yes, the stuff is hell on the environment (no small thing), but the thrust of the film’s message is that plastic is also toxifying us from within.
It has been documented that the plastic particles we inhale, or imbibe, can foment diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, and the film presents powerful evidence that it’s a major contributor to rising infertility levels. Plastic disrupts our hormones, and in one queasy section the film shows us a placenta with plastic particles in it. In its way, “Plastic People” is a horror movie.
It could have been called “Attack of the Killer Polymers.” Do I think it’s alarmist? No. If anything, during its last half hour (the film runs 80 minutes), it gets a little hippie-dippy utopian in advocating for a post-plastic world. “We became the first plastic-free community in North America,” says a resident of Bayfield, Canada, as teenagers hand out reusable produce bags and a take-out restaurant owner serves his brussel-sprout tacos in a plastic-free fast-food wrapper.
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