Film Studies: 6 Degrees Could Change the World
Rhetorical Strategies and Logical Appeals for Positive Action in Both Films
Film Studies: 6 Degrees Could Change the World & The Day After Tomorrow
Rhetorical Strategies and Logical Appeals for Positive Action in Both Films
In 6 Degrees Could Change the World and The Day After Tomorrow, both films lay down sound and reasonable rhetorical strategies in order to convince the viewer of their principles and opinions. While the basis of any good documentary relies more on empirical evidence than its plea to the emotional spectrum of its audience, 6 Degrees Could Change the World uses both in an effort to get their messages across to the viewer. The Day After Tomorrow is a Hollywood based movie, and while it relies more on principles of entertainment, its emotional appeals to the viewer resonate just as well as those of the documentary.
6 Degrees Could Change the World is a 2008 National Geographic produced documentary examining the effects of climate change on a global scale. The film’s title suggests its content; providing empirical evidence and deductive reasoning for the thesis that for each degree of global temperature influx we experience, devastating results will occur to our climate and overall living conditions. Scientists in the documentary believe were our global climate to rise on average six degrees, humanity would face complete disaster. Some of the results that would occur if we continue on this climate trend posited in the film are heat waves, drought, rising ocean levels and armed conflict over resources.
Using inductive reasoning and sound logic, the film discusses the repercussions of the wasteful and excessive human use of the earth’s natural resources; how it affects greenhouse emissions, global warming and other climate disasters. 6 Degrees Could Change the World gives sound and backed-up examples showing what each singular degree of rise in temperature would do to the earth. The film proposes that the sixth and final degree of climate change would result in oceans becoming wastelands, expansion of deserts, floods, pollution and seeing the end of the world’s finite resources. The film’s final rhetorical strategy involves the use of its narrator, movie star Alec Baldwin, whose narrative voice is meant to be recognized and thus resonate more with the viewer’s emotional reasoning.
The Day After Tomorrow is a fictional Hollywood film following the events of a series of climate disasters resulting in a new North American Ice Age. In this film global warming suddenly triggers abrupt climate changes that result in super-sized storms, mega tsunamis, massive freezing, and any other Hollywood-hyperbolized weather disaster you could imagine. In this film, fallacies and inductive reasoning is used to show climate disasters occurring in excess over the period of a few short days. Once the viewer is able to look past the nature of the entertainment value of a Hollywood film, The Day After Tomorrow poses sound and important questions on the nature of the severity of the climate crisis that we are facing. The film is based loosely on scientific facts, but plays on fears of global warming and an unstable climate.
