The Michael Moore documentaries were always as disheveled as he is but at least in the early days they aimed at targets easy to hit, requiring little work. Over time they’ve grown even more cheap and nasty. This one isn’t even narrated by Moore but by director/writer Jeff Gibbs, and he is a surly non-raconteur. “Planet of the Humans” shows no coherent plotline but flails at modern environmentalism, which Gibbs believes has been corrupted. The movie concludes portentously at nihilism backed by population control. The renewable energy sector can roll with the punches here, chiefly because Gibbs offers up tawdry images and false facts seemingly taken from the playbook of the fossil fuel industry (although biomass may well be a legitimate target, from my state of knowledge). But the chief problem with “Planet of the Humans” is not the content, risible though much of it may be, the chief problem is an unintelligent lack of narrative coherence or drive. Most scenes are trivially boring and the constant lurches between “on the spot subversive reporting” and lurid, pointless imagery is exhausting. If this isn’t the worst movie I watch in 2020, I don’t know what will be.
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