Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Visually arresting and even hypnotic,
the film hails from director Ian Cheney, who is a New York-based
photographer and amateur stargazer. In fact, one of his passions is
astronomical images of incredible starfields and distant celestial
vistas. He grew up under the amazing night skies in Maine, but now
due to the tremendous amount of artificial light ever-beaming upwards
out of Manhattan - or any urban metropolis, for that matter - Cheney
can rarely see stars after sunset, let alone take their pictures.
Cheney uses that as a jumping-off point
to explore the history and consequences of light pollution - the dark
side of electric light, as it were. Street lights, spotlights and the
general photon haze of cities, near and distant, interferes with
high-sensitivity telescopes sweeping the heavens for potential "Earth
killer" collision-course asteroids, of the sort dramatized in
DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON. Birds, sea turtles and
other wildlife are lethally misdirected by city lights. And, for the
AM-radio talk-show listening hoi polloi viewers who wouldn't care if
sea turtles went extinct, dig this news item: Folks working
night-shift jobs, exposed to light constantly and at variance to
normal biological cycles, seem to show increased cancer (somehow I
think lawyers for the employers will just say that's why it's called
the "graveyard shift" and the workers should have gotten
the message and known what they were in for; lawsuits dismissed).
THE CITY DARK is to light
pollution/overdosage what AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH was to climate
change - except I liked this movie more. As much as I wasn't looking
at all forward to yet another finger-wagging eco-danger scare piece,
I was transfixed - like a deer in the headlights, you might say. Even
on the way to the Surgeon General warning, the side details are
fascinating, such as an Arizona town maintained solely for the
purpose of deep-sky viewing, or a light store where original Thomas
Edison bulbs are maintained (and still usable). It's an eye-opener. 3
1/2 out of 4 stars.
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