. Variety's Owen Gleiberman panned the film as a  bombastically self-important satire  that attempts to be  the  Dr. Strangelove' of climate change.  Nathaniel Rich, who wrote the 2019 nonfiction book  Losing Earth  that McCarthy based his script on, used the same adjective when describing  A Statement.  At the festival, he called McCarthy's film the  first climate change movie written for adults  and praised it for being  not bombastic. 

 I haven't seen [ Digger] but I'm very curious to see it,  Rich said.  All I can say is there has not been a film like [ A Statement'] before. There are some films like this on other social justice issues that movie beyond a kind of polemic into a deeper exploration of the material. That hasn't happened with climate change in a feature film until now. 



On Thursday, 21 states sued the Trump administration over its repeal of federal greenhouse gas regulations for power plants. While the Trump-led EPA believes that eliminating the Biden-era limits will lower costs and boost American energy production, the Democratic-led coalition argues the rollback will set the country back decades in its fight against climate change. The back-and-forth is the latest example of how climate action, nearly half a century after the meeting depicted in  A Statement,  has become poisoned by partisan politics.

 Everything becomes politicized,  Rudd said.  This was not a politicized issue. This [gathering] was really smart people, Republicans and Democrats alike, who realized,  Oh, this is an existential threat and it is something that we should deal with. Now, how we go about dealing with it, we need to figure that out - but the science is there. We know.' 

But do we know? At the end of the film, Paul Giamatti's David Slade (a government director at the Department of Energy) offers a reassuring one-liner to Tatiana Maslany's character about the factual nature of science. The 1980 gathering took place just four days before Ronald Reagan won the presidency.

 Presidents come and go,  Slade said,  but if there's one thing we'll always agree on, it's science. 

 Yeah, well,  Rudd laughed.  I think he said that with a bit of a wink.