The 11th Hour
I don't know how things are in your life. But no matter what's going on, this planet has got you beat. We've made it sick, and it, in turn, is sick and tired of us. We have the floods, fires, droughts, heat waves, melting ice caps, and endangered or extinct species to prove it.
"The 11th Hour," the exhaustively depressing documentary (there's no dressing this up) that brings us this news, has the misfortune to be yet another global warming warning. But the word bears repeating, so everyone from Andrew Weil to Stephen Hawking to Mikhail Gorbachev is here to speak the still-inconvenient truth. The filmmaking, however, is far more relentless than in that Oscar-winning Al Gore slide show.
A deep bench of environmentalists, microbiologists, activists, religious figures, government bigwigs, and one plain-old American Indian wise man make vividly clear that we're trashing the planet. There are so many faces in this petition of talking heads, including narrator and producer Leonardo DiCaprio, that no one is called on more than a few times. The lack of dissent is powerful and shaming, since it's agreed that, at the very least, global warming is a real, man-made catastrophe.
Mixed in with stock footage, graphics, and scenes from various disasters, the film's participants make a jarring case for mankind's smallness, its temporariness, its heedless destruction of the planet. They explain the brief history of humanity, then tell us what an aberration we are. Our survival strategies are a Darwinian nightmare since, in an industrial and now technological age, they've not only divorced us from nature, they've essentially pitted us against it.
As the negative statistics pile up, the grim prognoses mount and assessments of exactly where mankind went wrong unfurl. Our enslavement to fossil fuels and our emphasis on economy over environment are, well, unnatural. Without trading in conspiracy or paranoia, the movie makes clear that business interests have made it politically unfeasible, for example, to consider expanding the Constitution to further protect the environment.
A bohemian spirit hovers over "The 11th Hour"; the movie says we have to get back to the garden before complacency and ignorance hasten our demise. This is a hard argument to make without sounding kooky, but the documentary is too dire to turn dippy, cheesy, or sentimental. Sentiment is what "An Inconvenient Truth" relied on when the director thought the truth was a cold reality we couldn't entirely handle. Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen, the directors of "The 11th Hour," don't care whether we can handle the truth. There's no time to worry about our feelings.
The curious effect of such a sugarless, unvarnished approach is that, while it's meant to rouse you to action, you watch the movie in a kind of spiritual, moral, and ethical paralysis: What can we do to stop this in time? You're even more demoralized after it's suggested that the film's title might be inaccurate: This is actually "The 11th hour, 59th minute, and 59th second."
When the movie introduces several well-known ecologically minded designers and architects who are serious about building sustainably, a silver lining starts to shimmer. Still, certain realities keep you from jumping for joy. More than once, we're reminded that 99 percent of species that have ever appeared on this planet in the last few billion years haven't lasted. Extinction is part of life. So, hey Earth: Things might be looking up for you after all. We won't be around to torture you much longer.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
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