The film, which combines footage of a lecture with interviews and factory visits, has been compared with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth in both its style and potential impact.

The film openly criticizes state-owned energy companies, steel producers and coal factories, as well as showing the inability of the Ministry of Environmental Protection to act against the big polluters.

The documentary is narrated by Chai, who presents the results of her year-long research mostly in the form of a lecture, reminiscent of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.

For the rest of this 104 min-long ‘Ted Talk-style’ film, she answers these questions, using animations, charts, interviews, historical clips, and site visits.

Within the documentary, Chai features two child figures, one being her baby daughter in Beijing, and the other a six-year-old in Shanxi, both victims of air pollution.

[8][9] She advocates cleaning up dirty energy in China to current US standards, by washing coal, using better quality oil, installing filters, and other clean-up technology.

[10] The targets of her film include state-owned oil companies such as China National Petroleum Corporation, which has also been the subject of the government's anti-corruption crackdown.

[3] The advocation for grassroots movements from everyday people, as witnessed at the end of the film, instead of obeying the top-down hierarchical system in place in China was probably another factor that contributed to the ban.

[7] The documentary featured blatant environmental violations by factories and frank speech by authoritative figures, reasoning that punishments would likely do more harm by hurting the economy and people's livelihoods.

However, the fact that the film was first lauded by the Communist Party official, but then subsequently banned, illustrates the internal debate within the Chinese government over tackling the country’s dire pollution problems.

Others still held doubts about the credibility of Chai Jing’s maternal position and how that related to the air pollution with her baby’s medical operation.

[3] As a former China Central Television (CCTV) anchorwoman and investigative journalist, Chai Jing had access to resources and gained support from both official web-channels and experts from the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the National Energy Administration.

On March 1, 2015, China's new Minister of Environmental Protection, Chen Jining, praised the documentary as "worthy of admiration" just after the release in an inaugural news conference with Chinese reporters in Beijing.

It was said that this abrupt ban was because that the central government was faced with the pressure of public perception seeing smog as an urgent and serious problem, and fear of collective reaction online that asked for major changes in relevant legislation.

[3] After the ban, some media outlets believed that Chen Jining intentionally avoided talking about Under the Dome in his first press conference while still emphasizing the achievements accomplished by the government regarding environmental issues, as well as appealing to the people on their own responsibilities to reduce the smog.

[19] The documentary also cast former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Jiang Zemin, in a negative light, prioritizing national GDP-increasing policies that damaged the environment.

State-owned enterprises such as PetroChina and Sinopec, who are both guilty of environmental destruction, both greatly prospered under those ill economic policies, which were addressed in this film.