The 11th Hour

This is Leonardo DiCaprio easing his green guilt the documentary has been co-written, produced and narrated by him, eight years after he ran into a controversy over his film The Beach8217;s shooting in a preserved area in Thailand. And this is Hollywood paying back something to the planet, after being voted as one of its greatest polluters.

Still, when it comes to tackling the biggest crisis facing us today, global warming, every little effort is welcome. But unlike Al Gore8217;s An Inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour is sermonising and has little new to say or to show. By now we all know about greenhouse gases, carbon-dioxide emissions, pollution of the seas, cutting of the forests and extinction of species. And about Hurricane Katrina, Bombay flooding and Arctic melting.

To have endless experts talk about the same, interspersed with stock, grainy footage, gives us little new perspective. An Inconvenient Truth worked by showing us exactly, and sometimes shockingly, what and how much each of us was personally putting into the atmosphere.

However, a few facts are interesting. For example, did you know that one tree can hold up to 57,000 gallons of water? Or that nature does for free what would cost us up to 35 trillion annually in cleaning up our air and regenerating our water supply if you put all the world8217;s economies together, the figure would come to 18 trillion? Or that since life began on earth, 99.9999 per cent of the species have become extinct?

This is our 11th hour on earth, with the clock at 11.59, points out this documentary. One second left, the problem worsening, we desperately need solutions. If that means Hollywood tells us that we need to be 8220;happy in less, cut our desires8221;, why not?