Sarah Snook as carbon is sexy and scientific

Carbon: The Unauthorised Biography, is a film that attempts to explain everything you could, and maybe don't need, to know about the mysterious element.

Carbon: The Unauthorised Biography, is a film that attempts to explain everything you could, and maybe don't need, to know about the mysterious element.

My body's made of crushed little stars

And I'm not doing anything

Before watching Carbon: The Unauthorised Biography, I had no meaningful idea of what carbon is. I knew it was something I should care about — what with the ad nauseam ‘carbon emissions' ‘fossil fuels’ ‘coal mining’ news cycle. It was too dense for my science illiterate brain.

How can you truly care about something if you don’t quite understand it? 

Directors Daniella Ortega and Niobe Thompson have made a thrilling, vital documentary that unpacks impenetrable scientific concepts in a way that is informative, amusing, and terrifying. It’s a film that many of us could do with seeing. 

They’ve done this by anthropomorphising carbon, giving it a personality. 

Sarah Snook in Succession . Credit HBO

Carbon is a ‘she’, voiced by a coquettish Sarah Snook from Succession. Who’s sexy, cheeky flair is less Al Gore and more Scarlett Johansson as AI in Spike Jonze’s Her.  (“Carbon’s a pretty promiscuous atom, she likes to hook up with every other element in the periodic table,” says geologist Dr. Robert Hazen.)

“This was the creative edge that allowed us to tell a very different, surprising, climate story. By taking this approach we aim to reduce the fear, anxiety and guilt that’s often triggered by climate change advocacy films and campaigns,” says the films producer Sonya Pemberton. 

The film takes us on a dizzying odyssey through space and time. From the Big Bang, to the Industrial Revolution, to Australia’s catastrophic black summer bushfire season of 2019-20. It examines what carbon is, where it came from, and what happens when human interference unleashes its devastating effects.

The fire around the Oxley Wild Rivers National Park east of Walcha, NSW, 10 Dec 2019 by Rob Blomfield.

The film connects the dots through interviews with an expert cast of talking heads. Including astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson and Tamara Davis, climate scientists Katharine Hayhoe and Will Steffen, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, and historian David Christian. Who each chip in to unpack this complex story with brevity and magnetism.

Our girl carbon has a bad rap, she’s misunderstood. She isn’t the problem, we are. “Don’t blame carbon. It’s not carbon’s fault," deGrasse Tyson says in the film. Carbon has been around forever, and almost everything on earth is carbon-based. But the rate we're burning fossil fuels has disseminated too much of it into the atmosphere in too short a time.

We are also carbon. A fifth of our bodies are made up of the element.

“Your body, your mind, they are born of my collisions," says Sarah Snook. "You are made of stardust. So is almost everything else.”

SEE CARBON: THE UNAUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY ON ABC TV AND ABC IVIEW FROM TUESDAY 12 JULY 8.30PM