Critic Reviews

When Two Worlds Collide employs a variety of styles and approaches to construct a single gripping narrative.

The directors shot over the course of years, and they put epochal moments on the screen, including a 2007 battle between protesters and police that left more than ten of each dead.

Earnest, direct and sometimes surprisingly dramatic.

The film makes its case powerfully, and the myriad parallel situations in which private commercial interests continue to trump environmental ones worldwide makes that viewpoint easy to accept as valid.

Listless at times and lacking the killer instinct required to follow through on the emotional toll that the fighting took on its survivors, the documentary is far more insightful about the buildup to bloodshed than it is about the mess that was left behind in its wake.

Ultimately, When Two Worlds Collide has a breathless urgency to it, even if its structuring of events feels a bit ramshackle, and the directness of its environmental warnings feel no different than a thousand other message docs.

While clearly on the side of the protesters, the filmmakers are still determined to explain every legal detail, and at times matters become bogged down in endless televised journalists and snappish legislators.

The issues presented in When Two Worlds Collide are so crucial that it feels churlish to characterize it as a dutiful, and ultimately pedestrian, documentary. There is something evasive about it as well.