"Burn Up" 4 hour TV movie a high stakes oil conspiracy thriller.

[keeha]

Anyone else watch Burn Up (BBC-Global co-production)  on GlobalTV last night?   (Canada, June 10-11)


Quality was good and the plot was better than I expected from a CanWest production.  Second half is on at 9:00 tonight.  The movie opens with a sniper attack on a desert encampment that is working for the oil company and are (mis-)identified in the MSM as 'rogue Bin Laden terrorist cell'.

As well the main character is a young up and comer just made CEO of an oil company and has his eyes opened between demands of criminal activities of his company he has just been made privy to, gifts from Arabian Sheiks, and an "Al Gore child moment" with lots of Global warming PR that gets him questioning everything.

Of course overall it feeds a global warming meme will solve our problems attitude, but some of the details make it OK to watch.  Altough the Level of "Conspiracty Awareness" in the first half never gets past The Corporation level.   [Edit: the level of conspirational intellegence moved wayyyyy past this in the second half]

Oh and I know someone who worked on the project- much CO2 was blown out constructing the UN set.   .   

http://www.canada.com/globaltv/globalshows/burnup/index.html

DESCRIPTION

"Burn Up" is a high stakes conspiracy thriller set against the backdrop of the oil industry. It is a story that mirrors the world in which we live and where we struggle to be both economically successful and globally responsible.

It puts us on a rollercoaster ride from the desert of Saudi Arabia to the elegant mansions of oil barons in London, from the beautifully appointed offices of the most powerful men on earth to the sweaty, backrooms of the new Kyoto2 Accord Summit in Calgary, where concerned organizations try to persuade, blackmail and coerce the corporations and countries most responsible for global warming to change their ways.

We follow the charismatic and ambitious Tom McConnell who at first glance seems like the perfect man to take over as the new Chairman of Arrow Oil. But after mysterious deaths and after an Inuit woman commits suicide by lighting herself on fire, protesting what the oil companies are doing to her native land, he begins a dangerous inquiry into the dealings of his company.

"Burn Up" is a Trojan horse of a story. It delivers an eviscerating tale where the stakes are terrifyingly real and the climate issues, the intrigue, the global politics, the back room dealings and the espionage are happening today in our world.

Refined crude-oil drama

There's a moment of exquisite irony early in the trashy but entertaining miniseries Burn Up (Global - 9 p.m.) when a charismatic, up-and-coming oil executive, played by MI-5's Rupert Penry-Jones, stares down a room full of company minions and asks if anyone knows the price of a barrel of crude oil.

First irony: No one knows.

Second irony: The answer is $98. Ah, yes. The good old days. When oil at $98 a barrel was cheap.

Burn Up was written by The Full Monty's Simon Beaufoy and directed by Spooks/MI-5 veteran Omar Madha, and it shares MI-5's visual snap and verve, if not its intellect and emotional weight.

It was filmed last summer in Calgary and London, England - tomorrow's Part 2 is set almost entirely at a world summit in Calgary - and features several recognizable faces, including The West Wing's Bradley Whitford, cast against type as a shady oil operative and all-around Bad Guy, and Guelph, Ont.'s Neve Campbell, as a passionate recycler who runs the company's "renewables" division.

[keeha]

WOW!

I was really really impressed with the second half. No plot spoilers here.  It is worth watching (if you still watch).

Like Syriana, but you knew exactly what was going on.

So good I could see Fox news projecting on aware citizens as "movie conspiracy followers" (BurnUpbees?).

The main arc of the move is peak oil.  The existence of proof that the "Western Saudi reserves of several hundred billion barrels of oil actually does not exist."  Comments such as "we're already past peak."  A level of cynicism of the US attitude on GW and LastManStanding that surpasses many here.

Plot written smart enough in the same scene that as the main characters realized the deception and late hour for our oil reserves, the person who delivered the information was plot driven to basically describe his leaving the script to prepare for peak oil exactly as we do here.

Even near the last 15 minutes of the show I thought for a time 'oh it was great till now, but here comes the happy ending.'   Well I was wrong.

Even an 'inconvient truth', WTF? moment at the very peak of the dramatic arc.

Did anyone else see it?  Were you as impressed? 

[keeha]

Some conspiracy theorists suggest that "Burn Up" is only available in Canada or Britain because the content is too controversial and anti-big oil, and too hot for the American networks to touch; Others point out that it is a British-Canadian co-production and therefore it is logical that Canadians get to see it first. Conspiracy or not, this might have been pitched as Al Gore meets John Grisham, with Rupert Penry-Jones and Neve Campbell smack in the middle of a pileup of Bradley Whitford (of West Wing fame) as a lobbyist, oil executives, environmental activists and politicians stabbing each other in the back or blowing each other up. Rupert Penry-Jones is terrific as the head of Arrow Oil, who quickly finds out that things are not quite what they seem. Kate Taylor at the Globe and Mail writes "This new thriller is hot, hot, hot!" ::Globe and Mail More tomorrow after Part II.

   http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/enviro-thriller-is-hot.php

This genuinely thrilling thriller ...
The whole thing's enough to make you stop driving   -GlobeandMail

BBC Commissioning Editor for Drama, Lucy Richer, says: "Burn Up is a highly authored piece wholly of this unique moment in time. The exciting mix of US, Canadian and UK talent, the awesome backdrop of the Canadian wilds combined with Simon's taut and provocative script makes for an epic proposition."

Kudos Film and Television's Stephen Garrett says: "As a lifelong fan of the political thriller, it's been incredibly satisfying to marry it to the most urgent issue facing us as the century unfolds – a potent cocktail of fiction and fact that we hope will enlighten as much as it will entertain."

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2008/06_june/03/burnup.shtml

Did it change how green you are?
Neve Campbell-...We're fairly aware and there's a good amount of communication about it. But there were definitely things in the script I hadn't realised, like how extreme the situation was.
Was the script all factual?
Yeah, pretty much. When Simon [Beaufoy] wrote the script he felt there were exaggerations - he had heard about them and not been sure whether they were true or not - then he found out they were. It's scary.

-AOL

[keeha]

Life Imitates Art:

BP's review of global reserves is tainted by 'political' oil, and distorts our view of future supply

The publication on Wednesday of BP's annual statistical review of world energy was therefore timely. According to the oil giant's chief executive, Tony Hayward, this digest of proven reserves, production and consumption is "one of the most reliable sources for energy data worldwide".

But that statement, as with so much about today's oil industry, demands closer inspection. Tiny printing on the inside cover of the document reveals a catch-all caveat. The information presented comes not from primary BP research but from "official sources and third-party data" and "does not necessarily represent BP's view of proved reserves by country". This astonishing get-out clause has been inserted in the BP review every year since Shell was caught lying about its reserves in 2004.

At the seminar releasing the review, I asked BP's lead author whether he could put an uncertainty range on the data in the report, since it came with a health warning in the small print. He wasn't able to, other than to confess that there were certainly "some good apples and some bad apples" in among the data from the official sources and the third parties. Those of us who worry about peak oil know about a few of these bad apples. That is one of the many reasons we are worried.

...Many in and around the oil industry believe that the 300 billion barrels of Opec reserves additions from the 1980s are - let us put it politely - political oil.

...BP encourages complacency in this vital national security mission. Its statistical review does worse: it relays nonsense from Opec and other governments, and claims reliability for it.

· Jeremy Leggett

[keeha]

Enjoy:

Burn Out 

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-4798345511999429192&q=burn+up&ei=BFthSOmxHo6M_AHbtcDWAQ&hl=en

I'm not sure where part II is.

However, while Canadian and British TV have been receptive to airing the mini-series, producers have yet to find an American network that’s interested. “Networks are sometimes afraid of these topics depending on where their politics are,” Campbell told the Canadian Press. “When you’re making a piece like this, there’s got to be balance. You want to give adequate and accurate information and not feel that it is just sensationalist.”

L

[TravelsHopefully]

This has finally been shown here in UK. All I can say is - it could have been written by a LATOCer 
Well worth seeing!