Extinction Rebellion has always been a lot of fun in small doses, but a 1hr 20 minute feature-length documentary feels like a slog. Come to Netflix’s Rebellion for Emma Thompson and her pink boat parties in Piccadilly and the hope that the planet might not choke on its own sludgy vomit. Kick your TV through your front window at yet more interminable, behind-the-scenes footage of a student stroking his goatee in his “world-changing” meeting, smugly cutting off a venerated climate lawyer mid-speech: “I’m going to pause you there, I didn’t hear anything you just said because you didn’t put your hand up.”
That’s frustrating, because the XR story is not only GoodTM, but also packed with lots of juicy drama. For a brief, sunny moment in April 2019, the planet’s most famous climate group could do no wrong in the court of public opinion, gluing themselves to Shell’s London HQ, banging bongo drums down Whitehall and baffling police officers with their willingness to be arrested. Politicians here and across the world fell over themselves to declare a “climate emergency”. Britain signed up to a goal of ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions by 2050. Greta Thunberg was immaculately conceived. Weapons of mass disruption worked wonders. “Wow, I mean, April was an otherworldly experience,” says one wide-eyed blonde. “Every day I’d look at the Evening Standard … how many pages are we in today!”
Then the dorks started glueing themselves to electric DLR trains at rush hour. “Apologise now, ya f***ng d***head,” yells a man hurling bottles at the surprised-looking protestor on grainy phone footage. “Middle class folk telling working class folk what to do,” roared a Twitter crank. We tried, guys!
What a crowd. Roger Hallam, the charismatic farmer and (former) leader of XR, was arrested and voted out of running his own rebellion in September 2019 for trying to fly tiny drones five metres above Heathrow airport’s tarmac. “My view is that if you’re not in prison, you’re not part of the resistance,” says Hallam, a cantankerous but strangely likeable latter-day Christopher Lee type stuffed into a second-hand Ralph Lauren knit. “You keep going until you’re banged up or dead.”
I had some idea Hallam was a bit of a wing nut. I had no idea that his daughter Savannah, a nice young XR member herself, staged an intervention before his Heathrow fiasco. “F*** YOU!”, she screams at Roger, when he won’t seek help for his addiction to protesting. The cameras are also on the scene as spindly, solo Hallam Sr, toying with a pathetic, piddly drone, is clapped in irons by a policeman on a verge of the M25.
As dippy as the protestors are, Priti Patel’s “p-leece” are downright disturbing. The Prittster got the Home Secretary job in July 2019. Wide-eyed baby bobbies who smile at protesters in the spring harden into heavy-handed bruisers before our eyes when we cut to the next London rebellion in autumn 2019, tearing down tents, bashing down doors, running cherry-pickers through crowds of nonplussed students. I’d never seen footage of the Met’s crackdown. It’s sinister. They simply seem to revel in being the bad guys. Sure, it’s one-sided filming. The documentary winds towards a polemic of the draconian police, crime, sentencing and courts bill seeking to boot sticky-handed XR types off the street. I’d love to have heard one sympathetic interview with an officer. Was no one available? No vox-cops?
I have a soft spot for the joyful, weepy losers at XR. Yes, they’re too white, middle-class, and annoyingly earnest, but I too would like this planet to be okay. Is it a privilege to think like this? It shouldn’t be. And they really struggle with the weight of the world. “The grief of these times is always coming in,” says Gail Bradbrook, Hallam’s co-founder, sounding broken. The family of Farhana Yamin, a gently-radicalised climate lawyer, don’t even know what country she’s in. “I was exhausted, I had an overload of emotion, and I just couldn’t stop crying,” says Savannah. “I’ve learned how enormously tragic it is to be human,” says Roger. “Because humans find it enormously difficult to get their act together.” What a dysfunctional family. But really, aren’t we all?
