The 11th Hour
Directors: Nadia Connors, Leila Connors Petersen. Writers: Nadia Connors, Leila Connors Petersen, Leonardo DiCaprio. Film editing: Luis Alvarez y Alvarez, Pietro Scalia. Music: Jean-Pascal Beintus. Producers: Chuck Castleberry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brian Gerber, Leila Connors Petersen. With: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mikhail Gorbachev, Stephen Hawking, Kenny Ausubel, Janine Benyus, Sylvia Earle Ph.D., Gloria Flora, Michel Gelobter, Thom Hartmann, Paul Hawken, Wangari Maathai, William McDonough, Bill McKibben, Wallace J. Nichols, David Orr, David Suzuki, Greg Watson, Andrew Weil, James Woolsey. USA. 92 min. 2007.
There’s no reasonable doubt that Earth is getting warmer and that immediate human action is needed to prevent consequences in the biosphere that will be awkward at best, cataclysmic at worst. If you don’t already believe this, sitting through ninety-two minutes of talking-head admonitions isn’t likely to persuade you; if you do already believe it, you won’t learn anything new or useful here. Compared with this monotonous parade of earnest environmental preachers, Al Gore’s slideshow in An Inconvenient Truth is a display of rhetorical genius. If the film community’s resources and Leonardo DiCaprio’s clout can’t come up with something more effective than this, the planet is in worse trouble than we thought. – David Sterritt
