Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The Verge has written one of the most unintentionally hilarious descriptions ever of serial Climate Clown Leonardo DiCaprio’s desire to share his green angst with the proletariat.

… Celebrities are keen on adopting righteous causes, but few are as vocal as Leonardo DiCaprio about his quest to save the planet from ecological collapse. “I am consumed by this,” DiCaprio told Rolling Stone in a profile earlier this year. “There isn’t a couple of hours a day where I’m not thinking about it.”

With Before the Flood, DiCaprio is asking us to sample a fraction of his daily burden. Directed by Fisher Stevens, Before the Flood documents DiCaprio as he jet-sets from Greenland, to Indonesia, to Miami and beyond, speaking to world leaders and, per the film’s liner notes, “bearing witness to climate change on a scale that no one should deny.” In the vein of An Inconvenient Truth or DiCaprio’s own 2007 eco-doc The Eleventh Hour, Before the Flood is meant as a clarion call for viewers to stand up, take action, change the world, etc.

Global warming is an objectively urgent crisis facing our planet, so it’s a special achievement that DiCaprio’s film manages to evade that sense of urgency almost entirely. It certainly isn’t for lack of visual stimulation. If you like watching Leonardo DiCaprio do stuff, you’re in for a treat. Here’s just a partial list of stuff you can watch Leonardo DiCaprio do in this movie: tour the UN with Ban Ki-Moon, speak in front of the UN General Assembly (twice), ride in a snowmobile sled across a melting glacier in Greenland, listen to narwhals coo, push children on a swing on the Pacific Ocean island Palau, tour a washed-out onion field in India, fly over a smoldering Indonesian rainforest, chill with an elephant, gawk at robots inside Tesla’s Gigafactory with Elon Musk, awkwardly greet Secretary of State John Kerry, offer baby orangutans fruit, stroll the White House grounds with President Obama, and kiss the Pope’s hand and give him a book of Hieronymus Bosch paintings. …