"The whole economy is a pyramid scheme." That doesn't sound so crazy, given the last couple of years, but it's just the beginning of Michael Ruppert's warnings in Chris Smith's minimalist documentary. Author, decorated cop, CIA whistle-blower, political watchdog, and straight-talking prognosticator of the collapse of the world as we know it, Ruppert has been trying to convince us for decades that a civilization built on oil and petroleum products is unsustainable.

Ruppert is the whole show in Collapse, which features the chain-smoking dissident delivering his assessment in blunt, easy-to-grasp terms: We're heading for a collapse. Economies are failing around the globe, the arable soil is being drained of nutrients that are being replaced with petroleum-based fertilizers, the human population has exploded to numbers that the planet can't sustain.

It's a dire prediction out of some sort of science-fiction apocalypse, and the temptation is to label it crackpot paranoia and fringe conspiracy theory (as many of his critics have). But Ruppert is well-informed, articulate, and backed by a pretty good track record of equally ignored predictions, if he does say so himself. We have to take him at his word there—Smith is no Errol Morris. It's not so much that he doesn't push as that he doesn't engage. Collapse is not an interview, it's a lecture with prompts, and Smith provides Ruppert a platform for his conclusions without investigating his evidence. For all the charts and vague illustrative film footage, Smith offers little beyond a snippet of a Ruppert lecture warning of the dangers of earnings based on derivatives and the impending collapse of Bear Stearns and the rest of Wall Street. "I was off by about a year," Ruppert confesses. But yeah, he did peg that one.

Actually, most of his arguments are pretty convincing. You just have to turn on the news to see his examples in action. It's the conclusions that are hard to swallow, if only because they're so catastrophic. Maybe the impulse to patronize or dismiss such alarmist predictions arises because it's just too overwhelming to confront them. Because if we do accept them, Ruppert's survival advice is pretty grim: Buy gold, store seeds, and grow your own food. Otherwise, we wait for a new, sustainable paradigm, because no one's rushing to change this one.