11th Hour, The

---

Tools:
Send to a friend »

---

Think what you will about Al Gore, he has undoubtedly done more to raise the public's consciousness about global warming than any person in the world. His ongoing lectures and his 2006 film "An Inconvenient Truth" have not only enlightened the public, they have helped spawn a slew of documentaries on the subject, one of which is the theatrical release under consideration here, 2007's "The 11th Hour." The big differences are that while Gore's film won an Oscar for best documentary of the year and took in over $23,000,000 at the box office, "The 11th Hour" ran only in limited release in America and eventually took in less than $1,000,000. Are box-office numbers a fair judge of film quality? Hardly. But in this case, one can make the argument that audiences may have perceived "The 11th Hour" as merely "more of the same." And, actually, they wouldn't be far off.

Leonardo DiCaprio co-produced and narrates the film, which attempts to show that people are opportunistic and greedy and as a result are destroying the planet. No argument from me, but as you might expect, there is no argument from the other side, either. The movie suggests that people themselves are to blame for the mess we're in due to their unbridled consumerism, for their wanting everything now and being willing to put up with anything to get it. More important, it accuses big industry of taking advantage of a gullible public and big government of being controlled by big industry. Needless to say, the filmmakers did not ask corporate or elected leaders to offer their side of the story. Nobody said documentaries had to be fair or unbiased. They have a point to make, and they make it.

The movie's introductory sequence pretty much sets the stage for what's to come, juxtaposing images of pristine nature with natural disasters and industrial and commercial pollution. You know from the start it's going to be a grim road ahead...for the planet and for the viewer. Then, when you see so much destruction of the Earth in scene after scene, you wonder if the film isn't simply piling on, even when you agree wholeheartedly with everything it's saying.

Attempting to go beyond what Al Gore did in his film, "The 11th Hour" divides its subject matter into three distinct segments: An outline of the problem of global warming, an explanation of the causes for global warming, and a set of proposed solutions for global warming. The film itself alternates shots of hurricanes, droughts, melting ice caps, and the like with comments from noted scientists, environmentalists, journalists, authors, and observers on the subject. Even Mikhail Gorbachev gets his say.

Among the various tidbits of information and opinion I thought interesting were the following:

Temperatures are shifting, on average getting higher than they've ever been in history.

We're the only animal that can look ahead to our future and purposely change it.

The world's population is growing exponentially. For instance, there are twice as many people on the Earth today as there were in John F. Kennedy's day.

We can no longer live only on the energy of the sun; we now rely on nonrenewable fossil fuels, and there are too many of us using too many resources too fast.

Oil now subsidizes our lives. We depend upon it, and it's coming to haunt us.

"As we destroy nature, we will be destroyed in the process. There is no escaping that conclusion."

But the overriding question the movie asks, the one that overshadows everything else, is not whether global warming is happening--we take that pretty much for granted--but whether Man is the cause of it. Yet at least one politician, obviously representing the interests of big business, calls Man-made global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." That's about the closest the film gets to presenting a counterargument, but the filmmakers clearly included it to ridicule the politician in question.

The film goes on to say that what with our burning oil for energy in every-increasing quantities, our cutting down rain forests like never before, and the recession of the polar ice caps, we're heading for disaster. We're losing control of our climate.

Yes, say the filmmakers, there is an absolute consensus in the scientific community that the Earth is warming more than ever in history and that Man is mainly responsible for it. It's only the big corporate interests and their supporters in Congress who disagree. Corporations and the fossil-fuel industry basically run the world, the movie claims, so governments fail to respond to the crisis.

---

---