Earth is in Peril. It’s The 11th Hour. Where Are Our Heroes? A Review by Arthur Kanegis, Scene4 Magazine
United States of America (Press Release) August 24, 2007 --
In this summer's blockbuster hit Transformers, "Decepticons" from an alien species, wreak havoc on Earth – things look bad, humanity seems doomed. But just in the nick of time, against all odds, our young heroes save the planet.
It’s an enduring cliché: From Superman and Wonder Woman to Batman and Spiderman, we love to watch our celluloid heroes save us from whatever creatures are threatening our world.
In Leonardo DiCaprio's new documentary, The 11th Hour, the creatures are us.
And the ways in which we are wreaking havoc on planet Earth are far more frightening than anything dreamed up by Hollywood:
--Injecting poisons into the atmosphere causing our children to choke and wheeze in an epidemic of asthma.
--Dumping toxic chemicals into the oceans, killing 90 percent of the big fish.
--Poisoning our food supply with pesticides, mercury, herbicides and more.
--Hacking down whole forests vital to the sustainability of life on Earth.
--Burning huge fossil fuel reserves, creating emissions that disrupt the fragile atmospheric balance that regulates temperature and makes Earth habitable.
-- Contaminating our drinking water, melting our icecaps and killing off species forever.
How would we react if an alien species did this to our planet?
“Would we be outraged? I’m sure we would,” Leonardo said when I asked him this question at a Beverly Hills press conference.
"We face a convergence of crises, all of which are a concern for life,” he says in the documentary coming to theaters August 17. “Every living system is in decline – the forest cover, the soil, the oceans. There isn't one living system that is stable or improving. And those systems are required for life."
Life on Earth in peril? In a fiction film, people would be gathered around their TV sets, brows furrowed in worry, clutching their children to their breasts, anxiously awaiting some glimmer of hope for how humanity can fight back.
But this is real. People must be even more anxious, right? According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, global warming hasn’t even ranked with Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton in the top-ten news stories.
At the Cannes premier, Leonardo spoke about of the frustrations of working with a TV network on an environmental documentary in the late 1990’s. Every truth by a scientist had to be “balanced” by a lie from the industry. "We had to make it just two people arguing the same point back and forth and at the end of the day it just became moot."
Leonardo was determined to make 11th Hour different. "This was really a homemade movie," Leonardo said, “three of us in an editing room…We made it with private funding so that no studio and no network could impose their agenda on it.”
For the rest of the review see: See: http://www.11thhouraction.com/node/422
Kanegis' interviews with the film directors are available at http://www.scene4.com/html/arthurkanegis-i0807.html
It’s an enduring cliché: From Superman and Wonder Woman to Batman and Spiderman, we love to watch our celluloid heroes save us from whatever creatures are threatening our world.
In Leonardo DiCaprio's new documentary, The 11th Hour, the creatures are us.
And the ways in which we are wreaking havoc on planet Earth are far more frightening than anything dreamed up by Hollywood:
--Injecting poisons into the atmosphere causing our children to choke and wheeze in an epidemic of asthma.
--Dumping toxic chemicals into the oceans, killing 90 percent of the big fish.
--Poisoning our food supply with pesticides, mercury, herbicides and more.
--Hacking down whole forests vital to the sustainability of life on Earth.
--Burning huge fossil fuel reserves, creating emissions that disrupt the fragile atmospheric balance that regulates temperature and makes Earth habitable.
-- Contaminating our drinking water, melting our icecaps and killing off species forever.
How would we react if an alien species did this to our planet?
“Would we be outraged? I’m sure we would,” Leonardo said when I asked him this question at a Beverly Hills press conference.
"We face a convergence of crises, all of which are a concern for life,” he says in the documentary coming to theaters August 17. “Every living system is in decline – the forest cover, the soil, the oceans. There isn't one living system that is stable or improving. And those systems are required for life."
Life on Earth in peril? In a fiction film, people would be gathered around their TV sets, brows furrowed in worry, clutching their children to their breasts, anxiously awaiting some glimmer of hope for how humanity can fight back.
But this is real. People must be even more anxious, right? According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, global warming hasn’t even ranked with Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton in the top-ten news stories.
At the Cannes premier, Leonardo spoke about of the frustrations of working with a TV network on an environmental documentary in the late 1990’s. Every truth by a scientist had to be “balanced” by a lie from the industry. "We had to make it just two people arguing the same point back and forth and at the end of the day it just became moot."
Leonardo was determined to make 11th Hour different. "This was really a homemade movie," Leonardo said, “three of us in an editing room…We made it with private funding so that no studio and no network could impose their agenda on it.”
For the rest of the review see: See: http://www.11thhouraction.com/node/422
Kanegis' interviews with the film directors are available at http://www.scene4.com/html/arthurkanegis-i0807.html
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