he 11th Hour may be a kindred spirit to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, but in terms of style, tone, and scope, this Leonardo DiCaprio-produced and narrated documentary on climate change is a wholly different beast. Rather than Gore's efficient, comprehensive PowerPoint presentation, Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners's film is a distinctly expressive work, one that seeks to win hearts and minds not simply via an onslaught of charts, graphs, and facts, but through haunting, frightening, and inspiring cinematic sequences designed for maximum emotional effect. It's a tack that could have used more moderation: From the opening montage of natural disasters and panic-stricken survivors, to its lengthy, ominous discussions about mass extinction, The 11th Hour often employs blunt scare tactics as its primary mode of persuasion. Nonetheless, even if occasionally issuing threats like a street corner kook waving around an apocalypse-is-coming placard, it also makes a mighty strong argument that there's plenty to fear from mankind's environmental recklessness. With the aid of an impressive array of speakers headlined by Stephen Hawking, Petersen and Conners paint a portrait of a world in disharmony, wracked not only by atmospheric and geological crises but cultural ones as well. As their far-ranging doc contends, it's not the 11th hour for Earth—which will surely survive, in one form or another, anything we do to it—but for us, a species whose root belief in limitless expansion (spurred by the Industrial Revolution, and typified by consumerism and materialism) puts it in conflict with its limited natural surroundings. While this reconfiguration of the environmental issue as a fundamentally "human" issue is sound, less sturdy are some of their creative ideas for righting our present course. A substantial case is made against our entrenched political-corporate paradigm—in which public opinion is unable to alter public policy—as the largest impediment to change. Yet subsequent suggestions for solutions largely fail to address what the directors see as the key hindrance that is oil companies' enormous, entrenched power. And thus consequently, the film's imaginative architectural and scientific "green" ideas, however convincing, ultimately seem destined to be mere drops in the bucket.

Feature: 2007: Year in Film