If ever there was a story that needed to be told it must certainly be the one of looming planet-wide catastrophe so compellingly and convincingly presented in Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's "An Inconvenient Truth," which will have its Japanese premier at the 19th Tokyo International Film Festival on October 24. Global Warming is not a new idea, but to hear Gore tell it in his 90 minute presentation of the history, science, politics and future of the phenomena, it has grown into the most pressing environmental and ethical issue in the history of human civilization.

That may sound like hyperbole, but to the great credit of Gore and Guggenheim they work hard in the film to present the known facts of Global Warming in as clear and understandable a fashion as possible, paying particular attention to translating for a lay audience what can seem like confusing scientific data and reasoning. The film is based on a slideshow lecture that Gore has given hundreds of times across the globe in recent years to educate audiences on an issue of grave planetary concern that has long been a focus of his attention.

The former Vice President, or as he self-deprecatingly puts it "I used to be the next president of the United States of America," appears in the film much like a learned and impassioned professor who by the sheer pressing force of his ideas and the ease of his presentation is able to inspire rapt attention among his audience of eager pupils, on screen and off. Like any good professor Gore knows when to strike a humorous note, drawing laughs to release the pressure, but he is relentless in pressing home the gravity of his subject. After one prolonged period of presenting terrifying graphs that clearly demonstrate the precipitous rise in the earth's temperature that scientists have recorded since the Industrial Revolution, Gore refuses to parse his words: "what is at stake," he says, "is our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization."

Gore meticulously addresses and demolishes the "misconceptions" that are commonly presented as a counter-arguments to climate change doomsayers, and he does so with a patient attention to detail and clarity that takes nothing for granted. Though "An Inconvenient Truth" was at first released in only 77 theatres in the United States it has since entered over 600 and now months after its premier it remains among the top 10 grossing films in the country.

It's success has raised Gore to movie star status in America, and many pundits and bloggers are buzzing about the possibility that he may run again for the presidency in 2008. Gore himself has remained noncommittal, declaring he has "no plans" to run, a position which has only sparked more heated speculation as to his intentions. Some commentators have taken issue with what they see as the baldly political nature of "An Inconvenient Truth," which includes several scenes that stray from a strict telling of the facts of global warming into musings about Gore's political and private life.

Among other things Gore draws from his childhood experiences on his family's idyllic Tennessee cattle farm, the near tragic death of his six-year old son Albert in a 1989 traffic accident, and the loss of his older sister Nancy to lung cancer in order to frame his thinking on global warming. If all that seems like a stretch you'll be pleasantly surprised, not the least because each of these personal digressions do have real connections to the otherwise abstract and impersonal, albeit terrifying, nature of the global climate crisis, but also because Gore kills and buries his image as a stiff, unlikable political operator that he struggled with so frequently in the 2000 presidential campaign. The politics of personality are shown in "An Inconvenient Truth" to be what they have always been: totally beside the point.

This is not to say that Gore is not personable in the film. Indeed, it benefits greatly from his garrulous ease and wit. But in a testament to its ethical and intellectual weight, by the time the credits role what audiences will take away most from "An Inconvenient Truth" will have little to do with the person of Al Gore and everything to do with the fact that we face a grave crisis that desperately requires strong new leadership to tackle effectively. To bring the point home Gore quotes Winston Churchill, who as the clouds of war gathered over Europe in the 1930s famously said to the British people, "the era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

It is with some irony that this is also a favorite quote of the current president of the United States, a leader who has been, to put it diplomatically, less than effective in dealing with global warming. But where George W. Bush sees an age of consequences for the handful of Islamic extremists who have dominated the world's attention since the September 11 attacks in 2001, "An Inconvenient Truth" speaks of dire consequences that will effect every last one of us, indeed consequences that we are already reaping. In Gore's formulation there is no "us" and "them." We are all in it together, and unless we all act together the future is bleak indeed.