Even if the politics of this film are squarely within the hippie-trippy environmentalist camp which seems incapable of rational thought, it'll certainly get you to think seriously about the issues which matter most today. Our leaders will kill us if we keep letting them lead. Psychopaths can't even be trusted to follow our direction, so they certainly can't be trusted to lead us into the promised land. We've got to force our corporations to move in this direction. Then by switching our transportation and industry from fossil fuels to electricity, we might just have a green future to look forward to, even if our corporations remain as happy, profitable, and psychopathic as they are now. We've got to generate cheap, abundant electricity just like they do in Iceland, without using any fossil fuels. And if we actually take the trouble to think, then it's pretty easy to see what we need to do as soon as possible. Instead, we've got to force the system we've got now (corporate capitalism) into an environmentalist direction. If we need to fix all political and social problems (read: corporate capitalism) first, then it'll be too late and we're all doomed. Well, as the Swede Greta Thunberg points out, we need to fix global warming now, or we won't have a future to look forward to. Anything big and corporate is by definition bad, and anything small and local (e.g., the shepherds) is by definition good. One big clue is the film's reverence toward the New Age religion which characterizes that whole hippie-trippy culture. I think the film's director is probably on the side of the most naïve, hippie-trippy, clueless environmentalists. The film's got it exactly right when it characterizes the entire culture of Iceland's leaders (and probably the leaders of almost all countries) as "psychopathic." Today's American corporate culture can best be described as psychopathic, too, especially now that it seems bent on turning the entire planet into Hell on Earth. Second, the more recent Panama Papers scandal showed us that Iceland's rulers are still up to their corrupt tricks. First, during the recent bailout of the big banks, Iceland's leaders were implicated as having ruined Iceland's economy by investing in exactly the wrong American derivatives. In reality, Iceland's leaders have recently been shown to be as corrupt as any Brazilian leaders, not just once but twice. We liberals in the west might like to imagine that the democratic socialists in Scandinavian countries live in some kind of anti-corporate utopian paradise, but the film reminds us that our utopianism is naive. I'm not naïve about the fact that corporations in general are usually the worst villains in today's world. So if you're really trying to combat climate change, then where better to site such a plant than Iceland, where all the electrical power is generated without burning any fossil fuels at all? I'm not implying that the big aluminum plant is some kind of environmental hero, but at a literal level, the film's hero has got her environmentalism exactly backward, going after exactly the wrong target. In reality, the aluminum industry has always been desperate for cheap electricity, because it uses a lot of it. The film portrays these traditional shepherds as environmental heroes, while the aluminum plant is the villain. But that might hurt the traditional shepherd culture in rural Iceland, so it isn't done. Climate change might be prevented (a little) by replanting those ancient forests. In reality, the treeless environments of the North, in places like Iceland and Scotland, were once covered with trees. She's fighting the good fight against corporate pollution, but if this were reality rather than an absurdist film, she'd probably be hurting the environment, not helping it. The film works well on an absurdist or symbolic level, but certainly not on a literal level.