Too much of everything

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Blistering performances.

Take a likable cast and put them in a dull political thriller that never really works. That is pretty much all there is to say about 'Burn Up', a show that aired in the UK in 2008.I like Neve Campbell, I think she's underrated, but this role does nothing for her. Bradley Whitford certainly knows his way around a political drama, after his 7 year stint on 'The West Wing', but even he manages to be utterly flat here.A bit of a flop sadly.

There is good case that the issue of energy and climate needs to be addressed as fiction, since the public is more likely to grasp actors saying lines than it is scientists showing charts.There is a huge amount of drama in upper corporate life, even without the obligatory, and in this case, improbable, sex that needs (according to some unwritten law of scripts) to be included.However, if you are looking for either, don't look here.From the first scene onwards, the improbable aspects of the script overwhelm us. The shooting in the desert could have been carried out by Boy Scouts, for all its effectiveness. They start shooting in broad daylight and still, somehow, manage to miss 14% of the targets.The main character jumps from a middle level flunky position to being chairman of the board, with absolutely no rational explanation. An apparently British oil company reports its earnings as "12 billion Dollars" time and again, as if Pounds didn't exist - as if, by Big Oil industry terms, $12 billion was a lot of money. It is a lot of money, for a decent quarter, for a year it puts them squarely in the middle ranks. The new chairman seems to have nothing to do - which is unlike most chief executives of major companies in my experience - no meetings, no business trips to see operations, clients or bankers etc. He cheerfully accepts a Maybach as a "gift" from some unexplained Arab on his first day at work, which would mean, in the real world, his last day as chairman.The first episode dragged so much, and the story veered all over the place, that there was a danger of getting car sick.The second episode, was, if anything, stranger. Much of it takes place in Calgary, a city I know fairly well (full disclosure: I have spent three decades in and around the oil business) and which is, as a town, almost totally..functional. The Canadian side of the production decided to save money (and energy?) by cutting down on the use if lights, so many of the Calgary scenes are very difficult to see, much less follow.Silly things continue to abound. The Saudi oilfields are in the EAST of the country (generally referred to as "The Eastern Province") and yet the writer kept talking about "The Western Desert" - a term used in Egypt, not in Saudi. Geologic data on an area as large as France and Germany is supposedly gathered by seven secret geologists, and fits into a hard disc the size of an Iphone. The main character looks at it for ten seconds and knows exactly what it is.By 2008, when this was made, the prospect that the Saudis have been exaggerating their oil resources had been a frequent topic of conversation within the industry, and well beyond. Nothing in an Iphone was likely to prove, or disprove that very complicated discussion.I won't even go into the politics, except to say that the BBC managed to "get back" at Hollywood's idiotic habit for many years of automatically casting a Brit as the Bad Guy by casting the entire American government as The Collective Bad Guy.Why did they cast Japanese to play the PRC delegates? Since when did Chinese bow when they shake hands (a Japanese habit, which the Chinese would NOT do just for that reason)? I sincerely hope that oil lobbyist are not quite as incompetent as they are portrayed here, or you have to wonder how they could possibly be effective.In the first episode, the Inuits are central. In the second, they have vanished altogether, in spite of the fact that much of the action takes place in Canada. Were they cut out for reasons of environment?There was some decent music. Direction was slow. The storyline a mess. The characters cardboard cutouts. The issues were so vulgarized as to become meaningless. In short, a waste of time and money.

A real shame it started to well on the first episode , but became a farce on the second. Most of the facts seem correct, but the over dramatisation ,poor acting and the just the plot lines which never meet , make it near impossible to watch with out thinking 'what's happening now ' . The 'lack' of quality acting shows through in the second episode. It's seems the production was rushed and many scenes are cobbled together with out thought of keeping the story line on track , also the ending turns in to a party political broadcast rather than a ending with any real completion . I think the BBC and Canadian global network ,could have done a better Job of this . Drama is meant to be drama , this is not in my opinion .unless you have lot's of free time on your hand's , give it a miss.

BURN UP is a sharply made four hour mini-series co-produced between the UK and Canada that tackles environmental issues - chiefly global warming - and wraps them up in a cracking conspiracy thriller. The series begins with a mass murder in the Saudi Arabian desert and climaxes at an environmental summit in Calgary. The main thrust of the plot is that evidence exists proving global warming is much farther along - and far more severe - than was previously believed, but is being suppressed to protect the economy. Acting honors belong to WEST WING vet Bradley Whitford as a morally vacant oil executive (dubbed the "High Prince of Carbon") determined to keep the oil flowing no matter what the damage or cost, and Marc Warren (HUSTLE)as an amusingly blunt British politician fighting against the tide. Fine work is also done by SPOOKS star Rupert Penry-Jones as a young oil executive awakening to the evil he is part of, and Neve Campbell as an environmental advocate working for him. A number of the personnel from SPOOKS worked on the mini-series, including director Omar Madha (doing an exceptional job here), and the intelligent script is by FULL MONTY scribe Simon Beaufoy. Lavishly produced (it actually looks better than a number of films I've seen in recent years) BURN UP is never boring, and achieves what it sets out to do: present a story that engages and thrills the viewer.