SHOT OVER five days in an abandoned warehouse, Collapse is an entertaining showcase for the controversial views of Michael Ruppert, the renowned 21st-century doomsayer.
Ruppert, a former LAPD cop turned whistleblower, has found fame for the accuracy of his gloomy predictions regarding the current financial crisis. Imagine what he’s prepared to say from the confines of Collapse’s bunker setting.
Detractors may well dismiss Ruppert as a radical or malcontent, but there is plenty of sense in his apocalyptic pronouncements concerning fossil-fuel dependency. His advice? Start collecting gold and growing vegetables because, when Tupperware becomes collectable and petrol pumps stand dry, anarchy will not be far behind.
Between dismissing such enfeebled alternatives as ethanol and talking us through an unseen history of political skullduggery, an intriguing biographical portrait emerges. Ruppert, the son of two former CIA employees, was an avid and anachronistic young Republican during the Vietnam war. Latterly he has found an audience as the author of several books on 9/11, and as the founder of From the Wilderness, a watchdog group dedicated to exposing government corruption.
“I don’t deal in conspiracy theory,” he insists. “I deal in conspiracy fact.” A chain-smoker who lives with his dog and is behind in the rent, he’s hardly in it for the perks.
Chris Smith, the director of American Movie and The Yes Men, allows his subject to do the talking; sceptical interjections from behind the camera are kept to a minimum. Smith gives his protagonist enough room to break down and question himself. In the end, Collapse is as much about Ruppert’s obsession as it is about such popular documentary villains as the Saudis and Dick Cheney.
A healthy cynic may well be suspicious of the number of dots joined over the course of Ruppert’s grand theory of everything. Or maybe that’s just what they want you to think.
