The 11th Hour
The movie The 11th Hour picks up where An Inconvenient Truth left off. Well, not quite. The Eleventh Hour covers much of the same material but with a more diverse group of message makers, including physicist and wood-be astronaut Stephen Hawking. What The Eleventh Hour does deliver is a lot of good information on what we can do to improve our chances of survival.
In another case of using celebrity to focus attention on something larger than a perfume or clothing line, Leonardo DiCaprio serves as coproducer, cowriter and on-camera narrator of “The Eleventh Hour.” The title reflects the belief of the experts interviewed that we have come to the place where action is urgently needed to put the planet back in proper working order, through applied science and personal willpower.
The message of “The Eleventh Hour” lacks the novelty of being delivered by a man who was defined by his lack of passion and personality but was reinvented by his sincere concern for the environment. But it is able to make up for that by assembling a more diverse set of talking heads and experts that one usually finds in an advocacy doc. Aside from DiCaprio, the best-known face — and artificial voice — belongs to physicist Stephen Hawking, who serves up a comprehensible context for what is happening to Earth and why.
We’re then introduced to interested parties including oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who — in informing us that about 90% of the world’s big fish have been lost to overfishing, climate change and other controllable factors — saddens nature and seafood lovers. There’s former CIA director James Woolsey, who makes the case that if the United States could rehabilitate a ravaged post-World War II Europe with the Marshall Plan, it’s not beyond comprehension that we could mount a similar effort to undo much of the damage done by careless industrialization and conspicuous consumption as well as greed, denial and neglect.
“The Eleventh Hour,” codirected by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, mostly avoids science-classroom earnestness by combining a matter-of-factness with stylish, global lifestyle visual collages. It benefits the most, however, by providing good advice and an abundance of well-considered ideas from forward thinkers of all stripes and persuasions who refuse to give up hope.
We not only need to be assured they are on the job, but reminded they can use our help.
(Thanks Shannon @ O2 Michigan)
