Collapse.
In 2009, controversial filmmaker Chris H. Smith shot an entire documentary in just 5 days. The location was a deserted meat locker near downtown Los Angeles. The subject was Michael Ruppert, a 55 year old unemployed conspiracy theorist who believed his unique insights enabled him to predict future world events with exceptional accuracy.
Collapse was distilled from 14 hours of raw footage to 82 minutes of dystopian monologue based on the fantasy world inhabited by Ruppert's increasingly fragile mind.
Ruppert was obsessed with the destruction of industrial civilisation, to the point that he believed it was imminent. He endorsed the theory of peak oil, and claimed that the Dick Cheney, the Bush administration, and Wall Street had all colluded with the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.
In 2010, Ruppert launched a commercial venture called Collapse Network, which was intended to create sustainable communities around the world. He abandoned it after just 2 years, and its new owners rebranded the enterprise as 'Transition United States' (basically a paid newsletter for doomsday preppers).
The quality of the website speaks for itself.
Collapse is shot perfectly for its subject matter: sparse, shadowy, and grim. Smith allows Ruppert to spew his nonsense with little interruption, occasionally stopping to challenge the deranged narrative in a tone of mild skepticism. Ruppert rants, weeps, and chain-smokes through his diatribe, utterly convinced that he is delivering a vital prophetic message to the world.
The result is as compelling as it is pathetic.
Smith's documentary enjoyed critical acclaim, and rightly so. Ruppert faded into obscurity until his suicide in 2014, which facilitated a brief re-entry into the cultural consciousness. Like most conspiracy theorists, he was a sad, weak-minded individual who had failed at everything he'd attempted in life, and projected this failure into his entire worldview (hence the cultish mania with civilisation's downfall).
Needless to say, his predictions in
Collapse failed too.
I rate
Collapse at 26.64 on the Haglee Scale, which works out as an impressive 8/10 on IMDB.
