Josh Appignanesi’s documentary Colossal Wreck begins with a dry, almost bitter examination of the machinery of planetary self-destruction. In 2023, the filmmaker travels to Dubai to screen his earlier work, My Extinction, during the COP28 UN Climate Change Conference. The place itself carries a crushing irony. Dubai appears as a central, menacing presence, a glaring metropolis where “oil money is converted into concrete, glass and false optimism.”
A sustainability summit held by an oil-producing oligarchy turns into an existential theater of the absurd. The film uses this glittering cage of commerce to examine how hard genuine collective action against the coming climate catastrophe has become. The stasis belongs to the psyche, the paralysis to society. The title, taken directly from Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” murmurs its warning: civilizations imagine permanence right up until the instant they stand as broken monuments to power that has already vanished.
Glimpses from a Cosmic Duty-Free Shop
The film’s form creates a detached dream state, a waking fugue. Dubai’s skyline appears through surreal, almost Ballardian compositions, an “uncanny valley of hyper-prosperous consumerist placidity.” The city looks like a Kubrickian spacecraft, towers rising while disquieting whale song seeps across the soundtrack, framing the “gargantua of insignificance.”
Architecture functions as anesthetic. The narration deepens the estrangement. An AI voice clone speaks Appignanesi’s words off-camera, “hyper-self-aware yet socially adrift,” a neurotic deadpan that suggests a mind estranged from its own body.
This dislocation matches the film’s concern with distance. Composer Vik Sharma’s score adds a hypnotic, outer-space atmosphere, reinforcing a sense of weightless detachment. Early images of an ordinary London street and the Tube sit beside the chilled, glittering unreality of Dubai’s Expo City. The location feels wrong for COP. It fits this film’s inquiry into severed connections.
The Paralysis of Thought
The film’s core concern is a critique of contemporary existence, expressed through the portrait of the conference. COP28 appears as a summit of supposed solutions held in the economic stronghold of the very crisis under discussion. The conference floor hums with “COP technocracy,” a blur of jargon, green start-ups and panels that seem structurally unable to produce meaningful intervention. Activists appear vastly outnumbered by bankers and fossil-fuel advocates.
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The film identifies its true focus as the “pathological difficulty of taking collective action” inside a culture of extreme individualization. The calm surfaces and shopping malls evoke “capitalism as both seduction and sedation,” a system that encourages “managed forgetting.” Appignanesi’s self-questioning voiceover operates as a “self-portrait of paralysis,” a record of how thought can turn urgency into abstraction.
The crisis shifts shape. The obstacle goes beyond a shortage of scientific information; it takes the form of a devastating “lack of connection.” The film insists that emotional lives, vanities and insecurities stay bound to environmental collapse; they form a tragic part of it.
The Emergency in the Present Tense
The long, cool spell of irony ends without warning. A decisive change arrives through the presence of indigenous testimonies, including that of Valdelice Veron. The film lays aside its analytic armor in these moments. Raw, “un-anaesthetised emotion” cuts through the intellectual murmur of the conference. Descriptions of “villages razed, massacred, genocides ignored” place the crisis firmly in the present, an emergency lived now rather than a hypothetical danger discussed in rooms full of jargon. The portrait of climate struggle that emerges refuses heroism.
The film withholds catharsis and denies the audience the comfort of neat closure. The tone remains that of an unflinching adult reckoning. The last, unglamorous insight the work offers is a demand for inner transformation. The fight for a habitable world requires the reprogramming of the self alongside the reshaping of global economies. The film leaves a question hanging in the air, Hamlet’s old dilemma: Will we step back from collapse, or only record and comment on our own ending, “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought?”
The film premiered in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2025, and is a timely documentary reflecting on the complexities and ironies of the COP28 climate conference held in Dubai in 2023. Directed and written by filmmaker Josh Appignanesi, the film uses a unique, essayistic approach, including AI-cloned narration, to explore themes of societal paralysis and the psychological distance from the climate crisis. It has been distributed for theatrical release by Dartmouth in the UK.
Full Credits
Title: Colossal Wreck
Distributor: Dartmouth
Release date: November 7, 2025
Rating: 12A
Running time: 87 minutes
Director: Josh Appignanesi
Writers: Josh Appignanesi
Producers and Executive Producers: Josh Appignanesi, Devorah Baum, Christopher Hird (Executive Producer)
Cast: Josh Appignanesi, Paul Goodenough, Valdelice Veron (uncredited, key testimony)
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Josh Appignanesi (uncredited, solo filming)
Editors: Josh Appignanesi
Composer: Vik Sharma
The Review
Colossal Wreck
Colossal Wreck functions as a necessary, self-aware document of our modern ethical failure. Appignanesi successfully transforms the absurd spectacle of the global climate conference into a meditation on human paralysis. The film is less a conventional documentary and more a hypnotic, unsettling essay that dissects the distance between knowledge and action. It offers no simple rescue, demanding instead a radical internal shift from the audience. A sharp, formally inventive film for a catastrophic age.
PROS
- The use of the AI-cloned, disembodied voice and the highly stylized, Ballardian imagery of Dubai creates a compelling, estranged atmosphere.
- Explores the crisis as a psychological and societal condition rather than only an environmental one, focusing on hyper-individualization.
- The deliberate break from irony when indigenous voices appear provides a moment of powerful, "un-anaesthetised emotion."
- The neurotic deadpan narration lends the complex themes a dry, darkly humorous accessibility.
CONS
- The film's insistence on denying closure or a traditional call to action may frustrate viewers seeking a more rousing, conventional activist film.
- The constant questioning of the narrator's own efficacy and complicity, while thematic, occasionally risks becoming solipsistic.
