Colossal Wreck is not really a film about COP28 or even about climate change; or at least not just about them.
It is about the pathological difficulty of taking collective action in a society of hyper-individualization and self-obsession.
The camera begins in an ordinary London house on an ordinary London street. No drama, no flourish. A slow track through hallway and front door, an unremarkable pavement outside. Next comes the Tube, then Gatwick Airport. We are en route, it seems, to the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, where director-narrator Josh Appignanesi is to screen his previous documentary, My Extinction.
Selfie stick in hand, Appignanesi drifts through COP28’s malls, foyers and vast conference domes. His voiceover — a ponderous, neurotic deadpan, somewhere between Jon Ronson and Werner Herzog (though, frankly, without the charm of the former or the gravitas of the latter) — is ceaseless; the man himself remains forever out of shot. The disembodiment is the point. The voice fills the frame, while the self never quite arrives.
Dubai is perfectly wrong for COP, and perfectly right for this film. The irony is almost too on-the-nose: a glittering, air-conditioned city in the desert hosting a sustainability summit, presided over by an oil-funded oligarchy. The city runs on managed forgetting: capitalism as both seduction and sedation. Endless malls serve as anaesthesia. A flash flood can drown the motorways one week and go unmentioned the next, even at a conference about ecological collapse.
Around Appignanesi, COP technocracy hums. Carbon-capture promises, ESG jargon, green start-ups, micro-loan schemes, and “assets” dressed up as community action. There is always another panel, another reception, another room of ever-better-dressed optimists, brimming with solutions that — for all their slickness — seem structurally incapable of addressing the problem.
COP emerges, as the narrator puts it, as both cancer and cure: the place where we negotiate the future, and the place where urgency dissolves into abstraction. In this sense, Appignanesi is the perfect — because perfectly ineffectual — guide. Hyper-self-aware yet socially adrift, he questions his own competence, his usefulness, his complicity. His narration becomes a self-portrait of paralysis: solipsistic, self-accusatory, intermittently maddening — deliberately so.
Then, abruptly, the spell breaks. Indigenous testimonies cut through the intellectualization and neuroticism — villages razed, massacred, genocides ignored. These are not future perils, but emergencies in the present tense. Their pain exposes the heart of the film: we do not lack facts; we lack connection.
Colossal Wreck is not a rousing activist documentary, not an exposé, not a heroic portrait of climate struggle. It refuses catharsis. It insists that our emotional lives — our insecurities, vanities and nostalgias — are not separate from the climate crisis, but integral to it. The film denies closure and leaves us with an unglamorous, adult truth: that fighting for a livable planet requires deprogramming not only economies, but our selves.
The film’s title comes from Shelley’s Ozymandias — a ruined monument to a vanished power, half-buried in sand. The warning is clear: civilizations imagine themselves eternal right up to the moment they aren’t. Appignanesi’s predicament, however, is closer to Hamlet: “the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought…” The question the film leaves hanging is whether we will avoid the same fate — thinking, documenting and narrating our downfall, instead of acting soon enough to prevent it.
