Saturday, April 5, 2008

The 11th Hour DVD

DVD Review by Kam Williams

Headline: DVD Discusses the Perilous Plight of the Planet Due to Global Warming

Anyone who watches The 11th Hour is likely to come away convinced that saving the planet from extinction ought to be high atop every advanced and developing nation’s political agenda. Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, this chilling expose’ makes an even more convincing case than An Inconvenient Truth that time is of the essence, if there’s to be any hope for humanity to halt the trend towards global warming.
Where Al Gore’s Oscar-winner was essentially a “before” and “after” lecture delivered by the former Vice President standing on a stage pointing at a series of slides, this dire documentary features convincing contributions from a diversity of dozens of experts out in the field, including acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking, CIA Director James Woolsey and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Backed by damning film footage, their assorted observations combine to lead to the conclusion that there is a burgeoning crisis in terms of climate change which borders on irreversible if allowed to continue unabated.
The good news is that most of the blame for the predicament is placed right at the feet of the human race, which means the solution to the problem is also within our grasp. Ironically, it appears that the man-made technological advances associated with the Industrial Revolution simultaneously led to the runaway consumption of fossil fuels now causing the rapid depletion of natural resources.
As a consequence of the rise in the Earth’s temperature and the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, we are witnessing a marked increase in such natural disasters as wildfires, drought, the melting of the ice caps, deforestation, air and water pollution, disease, the depletion of the ozone layer, etcetera. The segment of the scientific community consulted here has arrived at a scary consensus, namely that, left unchecked, this rapid degeneration will inexorably lead to planetary conditions which will no longer support life.
Overall, a cautionary tale sounding the alarm that we’re close to the tipping point of wholesale ecological disaster, if not already irreversibly past it.

Excellent (4 stars)
Unrated
Running time: 124 minutes
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Extras: “The Bonus Hour,” more than 60 minutes of extras exploring action plans for rescuing the planet.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

11th Hour does an admirable job tracing our environmental woes back to our individual habits; the "Nature's Instructions" extra feature was especially interesting... there is some amazing technology built into nature, there's a lot there as a model for our own technology