I'm far from a vegan, I'll admit it. Becoming one would be difficult; it's something I imagine I could come round to eventually, or perhaps becoming a vegetarian would be doable in the future. Documentaries like Forks Over Knives provide a good deal of evidence, and a persuasive argument towards why meat and other animal products may in the long run do more harm than good. As I get older, I do see my diet becoming more of an issue. I can stay healthy in some areas through exercise and moderation, but is that enough to sustain a healthy and (hopefully) long life?
The topic of moderation is an interesting one. This documentary doesn't go for looking at any kind of middle ground between eating a lot of animal products and eating none, and even though this is frustrating, I sort of (begrudgingly) understand why. We get a lot of facts and stats throughout its runtime, but ultimately, as a documentary that presents a stance on an issue, it is more of a persuasive, visual essay than a 90+ minute slideshow of facts and stats. It takes extreme cases and deals with what is often an extreme problem (bad diets being a factor in obesity and related diseases), and offers a rather extreme (to some) solution. How healthy simply reducing or making steps to reduce one's consumption of these unhealthy foods is not covered. It's less exciting, I know, and a fairly short documentary like this can only cover so much. I just feel like some more nuance could have made this film better overall.
At least it doesn't fall victim to one of the biggest flaws apparent in many similar documentaries: highlighting and exploring a problem without presenting much by way of a solution. To this film's credit, it is heavily focused on the solution to obesity, disease, and early deaths due to poor diets. Even if I criticised the solution for being very dramatic and possibly difficult for many audience members to consider doing, at least it's there, and at least it's explained thoroughly. Forks Over Knives deserves praise for this most of all- lack of subtlety aside, it would have been much easier (and possibly more morbidly interesting) to simply discuss the negatives and have a small epilogue at the end on vague solutions.
Technically this documentary is mostly pretty good too. There are a few different narratives explored and returned to at various points, and even with this, the focus on the important stuff stays strong and as a whole the film moves well. The only thing that really lets it down technically is the sometimes awful audio and sound mixing. As someone who's done a first year film unit at university, I know we get marked down pretty badly if we can't get our audio at least acceptable. Distortion and ugly sounding, poorly mixed audio gets heavily criticised in such early film school units, and so to have at least two or three interviews here where I noticed the audio being unacceptable was, well... really unacceptable.
So there are some downsides to the presentation and overall lack of discourse on any sort of moderation tactics, but the film means well and presents its arguments very efficiently. Like I said, I'm probably going to ruminate on it for some time, and even though it's not going to change my life instantly as the poster cheekily warned, it certainly has provided food for thought (and no, I'm not sorry about that terrible pun at all).
