The commercial success of An Inconvenient Truth thankfully opened the door for more mainstream discussion and action when it comes to environmental issues. The 11th Hour, a documentary produced and narrated by green poster boy Leonardo DiCaprio, picks up where Al Gore left off, while leaning on the crisis button a bit harder than the former vice president did.

Drawing primarily from news clips, stock footage, and talking-head interviews, directors Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen take on a host of weighty questions: How much of an environmental crisis are we in? How have globalization, Western consumption habits, and an over-reliance on non-renewable energy contributed to this impending disaster? What can we do to stop it? What are the institutional and economic barriers to making change?

Green activists — and even those with more than a passing concern about the environment — will be familiar with the answers and suggestions for change that the film presents, and it makes an urgent and impassioned plea for immediate action to combat the climate crisis.

But by the time The 11th Hour presents solutions for individual and collective change, viewers have been flooded with over ninety minutes of stark statistics, lightning-quick montages of environmental disaster, and declarative statements of imminent doom by over twenty scientists, economists and other experts (Stephen Hawking, Mikhail Gorbachev, and New York Times science writer Andy Revkin among them).

Though An Inconvenient Truth was criticized by some as coming off too much like a slide show put to film, The 11th Hour‘s mix of hard science and touchy-feely humanism often feels like an episode of PBS program “Nova” on stimulants.

Though the aim of the directors is to drive home the gravity of our global environmental calamity, the film quite often gives the audience way too much to chew on in a relatively short amount of time, covering issues of evolutionary biology, environmental science, ecology, political economy, and sustainable architecture in a ninety-minute piece. The end result is a film that’s insightful and certainly significant — but may be too overwhelming to truly galvanize an audience outside of those already committed.

- Keidra Chaney

The 11th Hour
Directors: Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen
90 minutes, Warner Independent Pictures
wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour
Opens 8/17/07

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