Courtesy of my friend Kien Boon of Boonuhkau, I had the opportunity of watching The 11th Hour at the KL Pac in Sentul on Sunday. It was my first visit to the KL Pac or even anywhere inside the new Sentul development zone and I have to admit that they did a great job in making the area look like an oasis of serenity in the middle of busy and dirty Kuala Lumpur. The price to pay of course is the prominent advertising everywhere on behalf of YTL Corporation, including brightly illuminated banners on both sides of the stage that remained lighted throughout the film and that we felt detracted from the experience of watching it. Nevertheless, it’s heartening to see a new addition to the cultural scene in Malaysia and my wife and I will be paying attention to what performances are going on there from time to time.

The film itself is a slickly produced documentary on environmentalism, focusing on global warming, that was apparently a personal project of Leonardo DiCaprio. As a long time skeptic on environmentalism, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I strongly disliked the film. Not only is it an example of hysterical scare-mongering of the worst sort, it ends up being inconsistent in its message and ultimately contributes nothing new to the subject. Worst of all, it preaches straight to the choir of the green movement, shying away from perspectives and solutions that could be beneficial but are controversial and unpopular among green groups.

The first two-thirds of the film present such a bleak view of Earth’s future that viewers will be tempted to simply throw up their hands in despair and resign themselves to inevitable doom. The Earth is sick and dying, we’re told; global warming threatens to set off mass extinctions and cause apocalyptic disasters of which Katrina was only a prelude; overexploitation of the planet’s resources and pollution have gotten so bad that it might even already be too late to save the world. As the activists line up to drum this dystopian message into our heads, we’re shown montages of the devastating consequences of natural disasters and the evilness of humanity’s enterprises. Never mind that they don’t really add up to a coherent whole or that much of footage is either irrelevant or misleading (what does showing a bear forlornly poking around a rubbish dump have to do with climate change?), what matters is getting the audience all riled up, right?

This is a problem throughout the entire film. Having a documentary that consists of nothing more than a series of talking heads giving us their individual and varied opinions doesn’t automatically make it a failure in my book, but without a single, coherent narrative tying everything together, it feels more like an extended commercial for the environmentalism movement than a serious documentary. The 11th Hour is broad rather than deep and sacrifices educational value for dramatic effect. Even its scientific credentials are questionable. The film plays up the fact that the current scientific consensus is solidly behind the idea that global warming is real and that it is man-made, but it then proceeds to make an unwarranted link between global warming and the apparent increase in the number and severity of natural disasters.

What’s equally amazing is how blatant the project’s leftish leanings are. Blame for the planet’s woes is apportioned solely to the familiar bugbears of capitalist corporations and big government corrupted by corporate bribes. People want change, the audience is told, but the big bosses and corrupt politicians stop these changes from coming about, as if the people were willing to put their money where their mouths are by giving up on gas-guzzling SUVs and holidays to exotic locations. It’s been often quoted that in democracies, you get the government that you deserve. Well, in countries that are both democratic and capitalist, guess what, you get the planet that you deserve. There are some attempts to explain that people need to change their attitudes and make sacrifices in their lifestyles, but in true leftish fashion, the focus is on broken economic systems and cultures. Again, as with any commercial, you really don’t want to offend the audience that you’re hoping to convert, and so when The 11th Hour touches on the subject of the explosive growth of the human population, it blames the industrial revolution and capitalistic greed, but conveniently fails to mention the simplest solution of all: stop making so many babies!

The last-third film tries to offer a more hopeful glimpse of the future by telling the audience that modern green technology, if we adopt them quickly enough and on a big enough scale, can save us all from this environmental catastrophe. We’re shown everything from self-sufficient skyscrapers that are designed to recycle almost every type of consumable that they use, to huge wind and solar farms that purportedly are now so cheap and efficient that they can provide as much energy as we need for about the same cost as big and nasty oil, to fantastic new materials created by mimicking biological processes found in nature that require only modest amounts of energy to manufacture. Exciting stuff, sure enough, but if our best scientists and thinkers are already on top of the problem and our green technology is already good enough that we can all safely and seamlessly transition to a newer and, from the looks of the impressive visuals, shiner economy without having to make any real sacrifices, then what’s with all the hue and cry and the 11th hour, brink of the apocalypse alarm?

One notable omission from the technological showcase is nuclear energy. My understanding is that many greens have gradually come around to the idea that in order to reduce fossil fuel usage sufficiently to make a dent in global warming without crippling the economy, more investment in nuclear energy is a necessity. But since the N word is still a matter of controversy among green circles, the film makes no mention of it at all. The funny thing about this is that The 11th Hour derides the use of fossil fuels as living on past sunlight, essentially solar energy that have been stored up on our planet over millions of years, criticizes this as an unsustainable practice and urges the world to live only on present sunlight, claiming that the sun continually gives off more than enough energy than our civilization needs, while ignoring the fact that the sun is essentially a huge nuclear reactor in space that runs off of a huge but still finite supply of hydrogen fuel.

There are some interesting and novel themes in The 11th Hour buried in a lot of other messages that are already too familiar or else so obvious as to be undeserving of attention. I would particularly have enjoyed exploring in a more in-depth fashion one commentator’s idea of persuading people to work and earn just enough so as to live happily rather than to work and earn and consume as much as possible as a barometer of individual success. Overall however, The 11th Hour is a fairly poor effort as a documentary. There’s no doubt that DiCaprio is sincerely earnest and well-intentioned and his celebrity status was certainly essential in getting this film made in the first place, but his contributions both as the producer and narrator are suspect. As a producer, he could have done better by not toeing the conventional green line so strictly and by making a more substantial documentary with a tighter focus. As a narrator, he might have, as one reviewer on TheMovieBoy put it, not spent so much screen time staring solemnly into distance and thereby trying to convince viewers of his seriousness and the gravity of the problem, and instead tried to engage with the audience on a more personal level by explaining what sacrifices he, as a notable jet-setting celebrity, has done in his life to make it a greener one. What we have now is a film that tries, rather crudely, to appeal on an emotive level rather than an intellectual one, and frankly, that’s not much of a documentary at all.