Review: The 11th Hour

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Narrated and co-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio.  Directed by Leila Conners Peterson and Nadia Conners. Rated PG. 95 minutes. Warner Independent Pictures.

It’s a little embarrassing to confess that the gripping, Oscar-winning global warning An Inconvenient Truth left me with a tinge of "not in my lifetime" apathy. And I felt a similar, politically incorrect sentiment in The 11^th Hour, a potent subject given an inert treatment in a documentary about how we have abused our blue planet’s resources and are a species marked for extinction.

Narrated and co-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, the film is a talking-head onslaught of global hysteria as an avalanche of academics, conservationists, environmentalists and even progressive CEOs flood the frame with cautionary, well-thought perspectives on something most of us already know quite well: we’re using everything up, and putting nothing back.

The signs seem everywhere that something has gone amiss on Earth: the planet is heating up; severe floods and drought are common; catastrophic, unexpected flooding washes away communities; hurricanes and Tsunamis devastate; fly-over states are pelted with hurricane-level storms.

According to DiCaprio and company, these global incidents, while reported in the media as isolated freaks of nature, are really much more than that—connected symptoms of a large scale red flag:

That our "civilized" race has made the grave error of viewing itself as separate from the rest of nature, revolutionizing our lifestyles and comforts at great expense to our natural home. The film asserts that some 50,000 or more species go extinct by our hands in each calendar year. And we are part of that food chain.

The message is clear—we are wiping out the earth by relentless economic growth and overpopulation, and that while the planet will eventually recover from this eco-depletion and regenerate long after a very possible Dark Age, we certainly won’t be on it. Yet is this downfall inevitable? Or can we fix it before the eleventh hour is upon us?

While The 11^th Hour is rich in perspective and obvious passion from its filmmakers, there is something too academic and familiar in the approach—a multitude of talking heads issuing doom and gloom, completely plausible, yes, and likely true scenarios—that after about a half hour or so, monotony sets in as directors Leila Conners Peterson and Nadia Conners continue a mechanical shuffle through their scores of experts. I lost my patience and only recommitted intermittently.

The comparisons are inevitable and An Inconvenient Truth, essentially a dressed-up PowerPoint presentation, had more resonance than The 11^th Hour, however well intentioned. There simply has to be a way to make these films more compelling that testimony, disaster footage, testimony, nature footage, testimony, disaster footage, ad nauseum.

What ultimately makes The 11^th Hour work is a third-act reversal, a wish list in which hopeful prescriptions are offered for how each of us can do our part to turn the impending storm around.

It’s an important topic given a rather routine film treatment.

- Lee Shoquist