The tar sands in Alberta are the focus of enormous ongoing controversy from environmental damage and the contribution to global climate change to the debate over boom or bubble economics and sustainability. What is incontrovertible is that the tar sands project in northern Alberta will take a section of the province the size of England and make it an industrial zone, as three barrels of water are used to extract precious crude from the dirt for every single barrel of oil made. This kind of short-sightedness seems obvious to some, and it begs the question what wouldn’t we do to get every drop of oil out of the Earth? Perhaps what we need is a new perspective.

Director Peter Mettler gives us just that with his documentary Petropolis, a 45-minute long aerial tour of the tar sands and their surrounding area. Naturally, one might think that watching nearly an hour of film shot from a helicopter over one large area, with only the musical score for accompaniment, sounds rather dull, but of course it isn’t. From the still untouched boreal forest to the very heart of the tar sands extract through opening mining or refinement, these collected images strike you in several different ways.

The enormity of the project hits you hard, the massive machines, the desolate landscapes that were once fertile vegetation and the trees in the distance waiting their turn. And then there’s the disgust factor. Rivers of putrid runoff that looks like someone hadn’t properly mixed their Nestle’s Quick, and the huge smoke stacks pumping out more CO2 than every car in Canada does in a day, and the almost frozen way the smoke from these columns appear as seen from above.

Of course though, one has to point out that this is a propaganda piece. Greenpeace was a financier and co-producer on the project, which isn’t to say that the images are doctored or that any of the stats presented are wrong, but there’s definitely an agenda afoot here. Separate from the political though, Petropolis makes a very powerful statement, or at least it should. Anyone that complains about gas prices should see this and recognize the true cost of what comes out of the pump. Light on narration and colour commentary, the film lets the images speak for themselves and they say a lot. It may be activism filmmaking, but there’s nothing subversive here. Just the facts ma’am has never looked so terrible, but been so refreshing.