“Five years ago, we would have been arrested for being here,” narrator Tim Robbins intones as a group of filmmakers enters the headquarters of General Motors. “Now, we were Bob’s guests.” A lot has changed since Chris Paine released “Who Killed the Electric Car?” in 2006. A new collection of electric vehicles has emerged — and the global recession has put the future of non-oil-burning cars again in doubt. Paine chronicles those developments in a follow-up documentary, with the strikingly optimistic title “Revenge of the Electric Car.”
Five years on, Paine and his co-writer, P.G. Morgan, are on rather friendlier terms with big corporations, like GM, and their executives, such as Bob Lutz, the former GM vice chairman who invited the pair to HQ. But the tone here is still skeptical — skeptical of any man and any operation determined to make money. Unless that capitalist urge is accompanied by another, more altruistic one, that is.
| ‘Revenge of the Electric Car’ |
| » Rating: 2 out of 4 stars |
| » Starring: Tim Robbins, Bob Lutz, Elon Musk |
| » Director: Chris Paine |
| » Rated: PG-13 for brief strong language |
| » Running time: 90 minutes |
“Who Killed the Electric Car?” focused on GM’s EV1, the first mass-produced electric vehicle from a major automaker. The story of that doomed car is briefly told at the beginning of “Revenge,” as well. GM made the car in the 1990s in response to state regulations out of California, but discontinued the program in the early 2000s — going as far as repossessing every vehicle out there from owners who were actually only lessees. Actor Danny DeVito talks about the “depression” he experienced when his working EV1 was taken away to be crushed and consigned to the scrap heap.
GM had a change of heart, thanks to Lutz, who championed the plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt. Lutz says there is an “inevitability” to electric-vehicle technology. (But he’s since retired from GM, partly because of his frustration at having to design cars to please regulators, not the people who drive them.)
Paine and Morgan paint a more flattering portrait of Lutz here, but they can’t bring themselves to be too positive about a big corporation: “The car companies had lied to us before. Should we believe them?”
They’re less cynical about innovators working outside the Detroit system. The man behind Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors, who also co-founded PayPal, is the big hero here. “Elon Musk is as close as you’re going to get in real life to Tony Stark,” actor-director Jon Favreau says, comparing the Tesla head with the title character of his own movie “Iron Man.”
One thing you can say about Musk: He recognizes that producing an efficient car isn’t enough to intrigue buyers, who often choose cars as much — or more — for how they look and what they say about a person as how much (or, more fittingly, how little) gas they burn. The South African seems to understand Americans better than Paine and Morgan do. They spend all their time on the companies making cars, and almost none on the people who buy them. But Americans, despite lecturing from documentaries such as this, just haven’t shown a great interest in the unattractive but efficient electric vehicles that have been produced so far.
