A Última Hora

I went into The 11th Hour expecting a straightforward, didactic documentary summarizing the current threats from global warming. If not for a momentary interest on the subject, I would have probably passed it up altogether. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was extremely nuanced, being an insightful and scientific investigation on mankind's role in global warming.

Rather than spurting out random facts and events (like most documentaries), The 11th Hour uses a wide range of viewpoints to build a conceptual foundation that explains the general scientific impression of global warming. Some of the ideas may end up being wrong, but all of them are at least plausible. The different speakers include Paul Hawken, Wangari Maathai, Mikhail Gorbachev, and (my favorite) Stephen Hawking. There are many different ideas communicated, but they are all based on the same underlying principle. The structure of the documentary is very dialog heavy, which can feel overwhelming at times but is guaranteed to bring forth new knowledge to viewers.

The main ideas are nothing new for most people educated on environmental news, but the speakers submit some profound new ways of looking at them. A common theme was relating Earth's existence to the human civilization's existence. If we continue to progress global warming, the planet might be able to heal itself eventually, but only once humans are gone. One thing I found especially interesting was the consideration of the economic value of nature, which ended up being roughly two times greater than the world's industrial wealth.

My only significant complaint is that the film is often rough in style, organization, and editing. The images sometimes feel out of place or even distracting from the message. Occasionally, the images rapidly jump between completely different environments, which can be hard to process. To be sure, most of the cinematography was excellent, but it just wasn't put together in the best way. Overall, it could have been more focused.

The 11th Hour is an insightful and inspiring documentary on one of the most important topics to date. It provides a balanced and comprehensive conceptual overview on the human role in global warming, but also expects viewers to take this knowledge out of the theater and implement it into their own lives. It is extremely educational experience.

Narrated, produced and spearheaded by Leonardo DiCaprio, this documentary about how humans have damaged the earth and what chance we still may have of reversing the destruction is hard to summarize, since it's a breathless amalgam of fact and opinion from dozens of experts and pundits. But here's a try: The planet is nearing meltdown. It's not just global warming. It began with the industrial revolution, when we started mistakenly looking on nature as external to us and endlessly exploitable. Forests have undergone major destruction. The ocean is turning stagnant. The soil itself is largely damaged everywhere. Worst of all, 50,000 species a year are becoming extinct, and no ecosystem can be identified as improving. Not to mention the fact that humans suffer from increasing numbers of diseases our pollution causes. At fault is the overproduction of non-sustainable manufactures, the immense waste and destruction, and the sustaining (unsustainably) of vastly more people than the planet can support. Behind all this the primary cause is the fuels we use, petroleum being the primary one.

So far, the process can still be slowed, perhaps reversed--but not for long. We have the technology, though nature itself rather than any man-made "thing" is the greatest resource, and the solution is in harmonizing ourselves with it, not further dominating it. In a few years, we will have reached the point of no return. This is not just the 11th hour, but the last few seconds of the sixtieth minute of that hour. Within this new century, if nothing effective is achieved, planetary damage will be dramatic and total in every area. It's impossible to predict, but extreme disaster could come very rapidly, once the balance is decisively tipped in the wrong direction, and it will happen everywhere. Nowhere is safe from it.

As one reviewer has said, if we don't slit our throats after hearing the first half of this story, some "intriguing options" are suggested in the last third Various speakers believe that while humanity may not survive, without a reversal of the trend, life on earth probably will. (Welcome to Insectopia.) But surprisingly enough, though everything we do has to be changed radically and totally, things won't necessarily look wholly different. The difference will be inside. An 85% efficient train car looks just like a little old train car, only its interior works will have changed. A wholly self-sustainable skyscraper still looks on the outside just like a skyscraper: the new Bank America building in New York resembles the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, only with more glass.

Not only are the technologies all available, but there are many plans about how to use them, and doing so can be immensely profitable even for existing businesses, if they alter their products and raw materials. The obstacle is resistant mindsets, and above all a lack of leadership. There's another obstacle--well, many; and they're mostly in the United States. The large corporations in whose interest it is to go on gobbling fossil fuel (or as writer Thom Hartman calls it, "ancient sunlight"), rule our world, and our American leaders are their marionettes. The average working guy doesn't think beyond the morning traffic report. We all need to learn to care. Dippy as it sounds, all we need is love. And we can act fast when we want to--look at the American performance in WWII.

Al Gore has greeted The 11th Hour as a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. In a sense it is that. In David Guggenheim's Oscar-winning film Gore demonstrates why and how global warming is a reality and a cause of grave concern. The 11th Hour sets this event in a larger context, warns further of the urgency of acting now, and, unlike Inconvenient Truth, goes into detail about practical solutions. The 11th Hour, unfortunately, isn't as polished and effective as An Inconvenient Truth. The latter is unified by Gore's personality. DiCaprio provides an appealing sort of youthful everyman voice (even a Hollywood superstar becomes an everyman in this context), but he doesn't hold The 11th Hour together. Though the range of expertise is impressive and valuable, structurally there is a dauntingly rapid succession of different faces. Even during the 11th hour of 11th Hour new speakers keep appearing and it's difficult to take in all the names and credentials first time through. Luckily there are a few strong and unmistakable voices, like the broadcaster David Suzuki; Stephen Hawking; Mikhail Gorbachov. The soft southern accent of Interface founder Ray Anderson, a "good" corporate CEO, is familiar from the Gore film.

Sometimes information and animated diagrams go by with ridiculous speed. It's as if the filmmakers were a little terrified of omitting something. This will work fine on a DVD where you can freeze-frame to check things out; it doesn't work so well in a theater. Speeded-up urban sequences look like some sloppy version of Koyaanisqatsi. These flaws make one nostalgic for Gore's measured tones. His detractors called Inconvenient Truth "a glorified Power Point lecture." But that's much better than sounding, as DiCaprio occasionally does, like the narrator of some high school educational flick.

Consequently it's not too surprising that 11th Hour has fared less well critically than Truth, despite some significant champions--the critics of some of the major US papers, and smart writers like Andres O'Hehir of Salon.com, David Edelstein of New York Magazine, Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader--and one could go on. Ultimately, the film's weaknesses don't matter, because its content is too important and smart to dismiss.

Attacking The 11th Hour feels unwise--like killing the messenger. Conners and Peterson and DiCaprio and all those bright people are saying things we need to hear. Is the quality of this movie really such an issue? The far more significant issue raised is this: sure, we can "vote" by buying low-watt bulbs and recycling and reducing our individual "carbon footprints." But to act collectively, we'll need that so-far-missing leadership. Where is it going to come from?

With the world economy expanding as it is bringing pollution along with it, combined with the lack of socially responsible leadership specifically in the forms of education and regulation, The 11th Hour superbly outlines the current status of our Earth's health, the movement to revive it, and a basis for the education that is needed to make necessary changes for a healthier planet. Much file footage is shown throughout the film that is sometimes not specifically discussed but does provide good visuals for the narration and speakers, which is the basis of the entire film. Although the production is a bit ADD (ie a screen cut every 1/2 to 1 second at times), the distress call for the environment and future of our world is clear. A 10/10 is deserved for this film for social responsibility and standing up against non-leadership while providing feasible options to reduce global climate change from the ground up.

Inevitable comparisons will be made with Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and so we might as well go ahead with it.

The 11th Hour starts off with terrifying the audience, in contrast to Gore's more introspective calm before the storm. Gore also interjects humor and his own personality into a documentary about his own crusade, while DiCaprio's is more straightforward, inundating the audience with mind-numbing facts and portents of doom. He also doesn't focus attention to his own personality but stays merely a narrator.

The 11th Hour is more comprehensive, drawing from various sources, but lacks breathing room to digest each infoload periodically dumped on screen. It decides to interject these pockets of space for reflection far too late, already in the middle of the reel.

DiCaprio's narration is also a disappointment. He is great eye candy that serves to pull the crowd to the theater, a terrific actor and is capable of memorizing tomes of text in his movies, but in his own documentary, his eyes too obviously dart left to right at a teleprompter, which loses the impact and earnestness he needs to communicate and connect to the audience. Meanwhile, the less-physically appealing Gore successfully portrays himself in Rocky-like fashion, valiantly trudging on in his uphill battle, which makes the audience identify with and root for him.

To The 11th Hour's credit, it offers more solutions on an individual level than Gore's. Despite the fragmented expositions of its well-meaning interview subjects, it offers hope and a heroic sense of optimism that we can still do something about the issue.

The best thing about this film was the fact that it did not focus on the Earth's destruction, but on man's eventual demise as a species. The earth with survive our rape and plunder. It has been here for 4.5 billion years, while we have been here but 150,000. We will eventually join the 99.999% of the species that have lived on this planet and who are now extinct. How quickly we join them is up to us, but we will eventually go the way of the dinosaur.

Through our heavy consumption and trash creation, we are rapidly stripping all of the resources from the Earth and polluting what we don't consume. Soon, we will be faced with the inevitable - it's all gone. If you haven't seen "A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash," then it should be on your list as a "must see." Along with "An Inconvenient Truth," this film tells us what will happen if we stay the course.

The only fault I found in the film was the rapidity with which it presented information. This stuff needs to be digested slowly, and we got it rapid fire. Still, it is an important addition to the story of humankind and how we are planning our own destruction.