Doesn't pass the smell test. To call this 112 minutes commercial / infomercial for biodiesel naive is beyond the point. Time and again the filmmaker hops in and out of the picture to share his enthusiasm for his truck running on used cooking oil. The solution for the energy crisis we are facing? Biodiesel is served up as the ultimate solution for about the first hour of the film: clean fuel (!!!) that will solve the crisis without us having to even change our cars, let alone our driving habits. Anyhow, halfway into the film (and into the production of this film it seems) the news on the catastrophic side effects of farming large areas of our planet for the production of fuel instead of food hits the newsstands, and the film tries a u-turn without making a u-turn. In vain. The only sane parts of the film are devoted to trashing our oil-based economy, hardly big news to anybody taking the slightest interest. The need for the development of alternative energy sources is mentioned (wind, solar) in passing, but for the most parts the truck running on cooking oil and it's driver stay at the center. In a country where politician can still shout slogans like "drill baby drill" without having a legal guardian assigned, this film may look like an improvement to the ongoing discourse. It is not. In pretty much of all of the industrialized western world this "documentary" does not even pass the giggle test. Somewhere halfway in the film, a group of kids is served a jar of biodiesel versus a jar with regular fuel and then asked which one smells better. Do I need to give away what the children prefer?
Review of Fuel
