A documentary featuring Al Gore. Rated general. Opens Friday, June 9, at the Cinemark Tinseltown and Fifth Avenue Cinemas

Billed as “the most terrifying movie ever made”  and other such lines, An Inconvenient Truth doesn't have the visceral impact of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or, say, an old Shelley Winters movie. But the documentary, which tackles unpleasant facts about global warming, is still fairly disturbing stuff.

The movie, directed by Davis Guggenheim (of the famous, foundation-minded family, and better known for handling episodes of Alias and 24), is a beefed-up version of the multimedia show Al Gore brings to college campuses across North America. But An Inconvenient Truth rises above mere edutainment, both by virtue of its smooth presentation and by the imperatives built into the material itself.

Using a variety of props, high-tech graphs, and other visual material””including a Matt Groening animated cartoon in the Eisenhower-era industrial style we know from The Simpsons””the former U.S. vice-president more than makes the case that we are royally screwing our own environment through the careless overconsumption of fossil fuels. The movie doesn't even bother to address further crises that will befall us when the black gold runs out””but riots at the gas pump will seem very trivial when the Antarctic ice shelf has fallen into the sea.

More ocean water good, you say? Think again: higher temperatures mean more Katrinas, and without those big white reflectors at either pole, there's more dark stuff to attract the heat of the sun, and that will mean yet more storms and rampant flooding. Gore-as-lecturer admits that cycles have always been volatile, but a chart””mostly drawn from detailed ice-core samples””going back reveals that we have already far exceeded the highest peak ever felt by the planet in a quarter-million years.

Good news for tour guides in the Yukon, perhaps, except that polar bears are already starting to mate with grizzlies, the extinction of regional species is accelerating beyond all expectations, and the Bush crowd has worked hard to remove whatever feeble controls were already in place.

This edition of the Truth goes behind the scenes, edging toward hagiography, to reveal some of Gore's personal motivations””his son's near-fatal car accident, for example, and his sister's smoking-related cancer death, and how that caused their father to stop farming tobacco. Naturally, it doesn't stop to ponder the failure of the Clinton-Gore administration to effectively deal with the issues raised here. (Nor the fact that the Republicans, seizing the House of Representatives back in 1994, made it clear that they wouldn't tolerate any tree-hugging on their watch.)

Regardless of anything left out, though, what's at stake is of such crucial importance that viewers will need to leave behind their ideological blinkers.