The concept of the film, as verbalized by one of its many interview subjects, is that time is running out; the environmental crises facing our planet have become serious enough that if we don’t act now, the results will be potentially catastrophic. You may think you already know this. You may have seen pictures of the melting icecaps and heard about the dangers of carbon emissions. Unlike An Inconvenient Truth, which acted as a crash course in environmental hazards, The 11th Hour assumes you walk in with some knowledge. The documentary therefore provides us not with one professorial stand-in like Al Gore, but with a series of experts who examine the problem from a variety of angles.

We hear testimony as to how our culture’s day-to-day lifestyle impacts the environment, how the earth’s ecosystems respond, and speculation as to what might happen if things don’t change, pronto. All this is highly enlightening, but my favorite section of the film is the final third, which spotlights some of the things that are already being done. When you hear about all the damage that’s being done to our ecosystem, it’s easy to feel hopeless or pessimistic. The last section of The 11th Hour shows us scientists who are coming up with creative ways of working on the problem, including the construction of environmentally beneficial skyscrapers. There’s also a CGI depiction of how a dance club could theoretically be powered by the movement its patrons, via special sensors under the floor that harness their energy.

If The 11th Hour is less entertaining than An Inconvenient Truth, it’s only because it lacks a central figure as charismatic and self-deprecating as Al Gore to guide us. (DiCaprio appears only intermittently.) Still, the film has assembled experts, such as Stephen Hawking, Mikhail Gorbachev, and David Suzuki, who are as informative as they are well-spoken. I also felt like I learned something from watching the DVD which, in the case of the environmental movement, is what it’s all about.

( out of four)

DVD Features:

The 11th Hour is available on DVD in widescreen format. As mentioned above, the packaging is 100% eco-friendly. Best of all is the price: in order to get this disc into as many hands as possible, Warner Home Video is selling it for the suggested retail price of just $4.99. That’s right – a brand new feature film on DVD for less than five bucks.

The disc also comes with over an hour of additional interviews with leading experts, each of whom detail ideas for saving the planet. These segments are titled: