Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4356 in DVD
• Released on: 2008-06-02
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 90 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
The 11th Hour may not have enjoyed the profile of the last major documentary to tackle the issues and challenges of climate change (that’d be Al Gore’s engrossing Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth), but it’s no less compelling, and proves to be a thought-provoking feature in its own right.

Producer and narrator Leonardo Di Caprio, who also shares a writing credit, is the glue that holds The 11th Hour together, and this diligent documentary presents a lot of information. What’s more, it balances its subject matter a little more accessibly than An Inconvenient Truth. The latter appeared to rush through the segment where it addressed the things we can do to help fight climate change, but The 11th Hour--in among some very hard-hitting material--makes sure that it devotes enough of its focus to the what-happens-next.

To top it off, it’s attracted some heavyweight world figures to stand before the camera. Some you will have heard of (Professor Stephen Hawking and Mikhail Gorbachev, for instance), and others are less known, but the cumulative effect of their contributions gives The 11th Hour a gravity and power that is hard to ignore. And while occasionally you can’t help but feel it slips into being a little too preachy, it tackles a serious subject exceptionally well. A documentary absolutely not to be missed, for more than one reason. --Jon Foster

Synopsis
Leonardo DiCaprio (THE DEPARTED, TITANIC) presents this thought-provoking documentary about the fragile state of our planet's ecosystems and the dangers we face. We've all seen the devastating effects of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, and now scientists and experts from around the world believe that unless we act immediately to cut carbon emissions and switch to renewable energy sources, humankind is in very real danger of becoming extinct. The film explores how we arrived at this unfortunate predicament, blaming industrial civilisation for much of the damage and world leaders for allowing it to happen. It's not all doom and gloom though; if we reduce the human footprint on Earth by a wide enough margin, we can effectively change the course of our planet's future. THE 11TH HOUR gathers an impressive list of supporters, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, renowned scientist Stephen Hawking, former head of the CIA R. James Woolsey, and over 50 leading scientists.

Customer Reviews

The best of the environmental documentaries
Of the many documentaries I've watched lately, I am happy to say that The 11th Hour is the first that doesn't leave me feeling depressed, powerless and frustrated afterward--quite the opposite actually.

The 11th Hour gets its points across with the help of some very reputable interviewees and some sometimes very graphic footage. At points, I was on the verge of tears. However, the solutions section of the film was inspiring. It is this aspect of this film that makes it the best of the modern environmental documentaries I've seen. I felt relieved that even despite the bleak picture painted (and trust me, it was BLEAK!), there really ARE things we can do to reverse climate change. They are manageable, not impossible, and effective.

One scientist in the film made a very poignant point in particular: rather than lament this time we are living in as the end of civilisation as we know it and feeling the burden of the responsibility to "save the planet", we can instead choose to feel LUCKY to be born in a time when our creativity is called upon to completely reinvent all the man-made systems in place on Earth. What a privilege to be born in the generation who successfully turns things around!

The first step is to raise awareness. I suggest you buy or rent this film, invite all your friends over and watch it together.

The cover is nice
There's an old saying: if you can't say something positive, best say nothing at all. Well the cover is nice. It's eco-friendly too as it is made of recycled material. There's some helpful advice on the inside on how to save the planet by amongst other things, turning the light off when you leave a room. Hmmn, that'll save the planet! Di Caprio fans might be disappointed to learn that he only appears in this film for about five minutes. It's a brave departure for him to get involved in such a project but there is no explanation as to why.

Too be honest, there's a lot in this film I can agree with. We could do with consuming less and recycling more, less pollution and so on. However, I don't agree that Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant. I see no need to tax it. For me it's food for plants and most of the CO2 in the atmosphere is not man-made anyway. Dissenting views like this are not included in this film except for a five second clip of a US Congressman describing Global Warming as a hoax. Most of it is just experts delivering monologues in studios. The most exciting thing that happens in this film is a Polar Bear jumping off some melting ice.

I have to confess I fell asleep several times during this film, so this could be a great cure for insomnia, unless you lying awake worrying about Gobal Warming in which case I should tell you Climate Change is caused by variations in sunspot activity. And in case you're wondering, Polar Bears can swim for up to sixty miles. If you must watch this film, watch some climate sceptic film afterwards and make your own mind up.

Can we fix it?
There's a certain redundancy about the Leonardo Di Caprio produced environmental polemic The 11th Hour in that all of the messages were already communicated by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth and far more coherently. Indeed, many of the same charts even appear in this film, rather smaller, better animated and on screen for a seconds and though the message, that the world is broken unless we can convince our leaders to do something about it, for some reason this barrage of scientists make a less convincing case than the a former next President of the United States. The overall impression is of Adam Curtis (The Power of Nightmares) remaking a Godfrey Reggio film (Koyaanisqatsi) interspersing the shots of landscapes and cities and death with vignettes from Richard Linklater's Waking Life before the animation was applied.

Unlike the Gore film, there's no respite from the statistics and shouting, as face after face, archive clip on archive clip shuffle through, rarely giving the viewer a chance to take stock before some other apocalyptic vision is introduced. The previous slide show was paced by pertinent dips into Al's biography, explaining why the environmental cause is important to him and so how it should be important to us. Here, the only relief is in some scenic pieces to camera by Leo himself standing on the edge of what looks like the Grand Canyon, doubtlessly attempting to use his star power to attract those who might otherwise be disaffected. But there's little levity and though the film ends on a positive note, with contributions from companies apparently winning the environmental fight the overall impression is that Big Oil will win in the end. That doesn't seem fair does it?