It could almost be a “Beatles or Elvis” or “Mac or PC” question, this: are you an Inconvenient Truth person, or is The 11th Hour more your bag?

I really came to this expecting a tragically hip makeover of Al Gore’s dull scare-mongering slideshow (that description should let you in on my answer to the above question, lol). But though there’s certainly something about Leonardo DiCaprio squinting at the audience that’s at times potentially as annoying as Gore, and the movie does feel at times like a good sit-down-telling-off session, it’s probably put best towards the end by one of the ‘experts’ when he says, “It’s not just global warming …”

I found the movie overall much closer to the “What the Bleep?!” movies (1 2) – though all the talking heads in some way support the overall message that we need to do something about global warming, they’re all very distinct personalities and have very different philosophies about the why of it all. My favourite line in the documentary comes towards the end (sorry to those concerned, I didn’t note down any names): “We need to be slower and we need to be smarter. That means disengaging from consumerism as the main avenue of experience.” It’s really as much about us being plain better as a race as it is about turning off the lights when we’re not in the room. To complete the first quote I began with, “It’s not just global warming – it’s an outward mirror of an inward condition.”

Like I said, it does feel a lot like being told off for 90 minutes. Oddly, my response to that is: if you really feel like you’re above being told off just ‘cos you left school a few years ago, then perhaps you deserve the shitstorm that’s coming. I found it a much more intelligent movie than Al Gore’s, perhaps because the things it’s asking people to do – which really amount to just being a little more considerate – apply whether global warming is real or not. Viewed that way, I can’t deny, this movie really kinda gave me chills.

Speaking of jarringly bizarre endings ... the ending to this one actually somehow didn’t spoil the movie for me as much as it has for many. Moulin Rouge, March of the Penguins, An Inconvenient Truth and A.i. might sound like a weird combo – but that’s what Happy Feet is, and it’s even weirder than that. I think it might also be the best movie I’ve seen from 2006. It contains some of the best animation I’ve seen since Finding Nemo, some hilarious lines courtesy of Robin Williams, and made me want to do something about the “whole environment thing” about a million times more than Al Gore’s little lecture did. And I don’t know how it did this – it just reached in and touched my heart and left me wondering how the hell it got in there in the first place. I’ll really have to see it again to make sense of my own response to this wonderful movie. I thought nothing could beat Monster House in the animation genre last year – but this one beats everything back into the water.

Again we enter the category of “it’s not even a movie so why am I reviewing it?” I kinda can’t believe I complained about the Ken Burns-ishness of In the Realms of the Unreal the other day when there’s a movie like this out there currently picking up Oscar buzz and getting an 8+ on the IMDb voting system. Sure, this thing carries a powerful message and one can just about get through it without falling asleep, but really it comes off in the end as a boring old guy wrapping up a global warming lecture in pretty packaging that at turns fails to resemble a Steve Jobs Keynote and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and the most ass-kissing audience I’ve ever heard, I swear there must’ve been cue-cards telling them when to laugh heartily etc. at his jokes.

I’m being overly hard on it, I know, but I get this way when the balance of opinion seems so weirdly out of whack. I like the tone Gore ends on, and the Melissa Etheridge song, and all the ideas that come up on screen during the end credits – I even noticed the movie carries a credit for “energy offset”, is this a first? It’s certainly a movie that puts its money where its mouth is, I guess. But it’s far from must-see material.

I’ll be sad to see this win the Best Documentary Oscar next year, but looking at the “competition” it’s really quite a sucky year. This really is the laziest documentary ever made. A movie needs to be so much more than this if it wants to change the world.