Post by Dracula on Jan 11, 2022 0:17:23 GMT -5
Don’t Look Up(12/29/2021)
I’m going to put my biases on the table right away: if there’s any movie this year I’ve dreaded having to watch it’s probably Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up. I was curious enough to see what McKay had up his sleeve but a major red flag emerged when I learned that political commentator David Sirota, emperor of the Bernie Bros, had a writing credit on the damn thing. Sirota is one of my least favorite people in the world, a man who bears a great deal of personal responsibility for everything I find to be shrill, needlessly divisive, and unproductive in progressive circles today and he’s rather predictably become every bit the instigator you’d expect on social media about this film’s critical reception. Fortunately the guy only has a “story by” credit here so this isn’t quite the disaster I’d feared but I do think it’s still a rather misguided piece of work. The film is meant to be an allegorical satire in which a scientist discovers a comet heading on a direct collision course with Earth and upon alerting the public to this he’s baffled to find the public to be distracted by pop culture to the point of apathy and the government to be too self-interested to respond appropriately. This is plainly meant to be an allegory for the world’s reaction to climate change but I think this is a pretty flawed metaphor. The public’s response to climate change is, as Al Gore famously put it, an exercise in the boiling frog dynamic where there’s enough time to procrastinate and push hardship off on future generations… it is unlikely that people would react in the exact same way to a flaming ice ball threatening to kill everyone on Earth within six months.
The film also kind of ignores that a big part of people’s reluctance to act on climate change has to do with the fact that it would require a lot or resources and demand, at least on some level, some sacrifice from people but that doesn’t seem to be the case in this situation. There are other more mundane issues here as well. For one thing Leonardo DiCaprio seems woefully miscast here given that his defining characteristic is that he’s a scientist who’s too technical and uncharismatic to get his message across, which is... not a role I’d give to someone known to be one of the world’s most glamorous movie star. But more importantly, the movie just isn’t very funny… at all. It wants to be this profoundly dark satire but a lot of the figures in it like the president played by Meryl Streep doesn’t seems sadly recognizable so much as they feel like Saturday Night Live sketch characters. If anything what this movie desperately needs is Will Ferrell, or at least the kind of comedic attitude that casting someone like that would have brought the film. It would have worked a lot better and seemed more subversive and unexpected if it had been trying to reach the masses with its message like that than it does trying to be a prestige satire like McKay’s last two films. There are some pearls of wit here and there and some aspects work better than others, but I think it’s pretty clearly a miss, and yeah there were elements of its attitude that bugged me quite a bit.
** out of Five
I’m going to put my biases on the table right away: if there’s any movie this year I’ve dreaded having to watch it’s probably Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up. I was curious enough to see what McKay had up his sleeve but a major red flag emerged when I learned that political commentator David Sirota, emperor of the Bernie Bros, had a writing credit on the damn thing. Sirota is one of my least favorite people in the world, a man who bears a great deal of personal responsibility for everything I find to be shrill, needlessly divisive, and unproductive in progressive circles today and he’s rather predictably become every bit the instigator you’d expect on social media about this film’s critical reception. Fortunately the guy only has a “story by” credit here so this isn’t quite the disaster I’d feared but I do think it’s still a rather misguided piece of work. The film is meant to be an allegorical satire in which a scientist discovers a comet heading on a direct collision course with Earth and upon alerting the public to this he’s baffled to find the public to be distracted by pop culture to the point of apathy and the government to be too self-interested to respond appropriately. This is plainly meant to be an allegory for the world’s reaction to climate change but I think this is a pretty flawed metaphor. The public’s response to climate change is, as Al Gore famously put it, an exercise in the boiling frog dynamic where there’s enough time to procrastinate and push hardship off on future generations… it is unlikely that people would react in the exact same way to a flaming ice ball threatening to kill everyone on Earth within six months.
The film also kind of ignores that a big part of people’s reluctance to act on climate change has to do with the fact that it would require a lot or resources and demand, at least on some level, some sacrifice from people but that doesn’t seem to be the case in this situation. There are other more mundane issues here as well. For one thing Leonardo DiCaprio seems woefully miscast here given that his defining characteristic is that he’s a scientist who’s too technical and uncharismatic to get his message across, which is... not a role I’d give to someone known to be one of the world’s most glamorous movie star. But more importantly, the movie just isn’t very funny… at all. It wants to be this profoundly dark satire but a lot of the figures in it like the president played by Meryl Streep doesn’t seems sadly recognizable so much as they feel like Saturday Night Live sketch characters. If anything what this movie desperately needs is Will Ferrell, or at least the kind of comedic attitude that casting someone like that would have brought the film. It would have worked a lot better and seemed more subversive and unexpected if it had been trying to reach the masses with its message like that than it does trying to be a prestige satire like McKay’s last two films. There are some pearls of wit here and there and some aspects work better than others, but I think it’s pretty clearly a miss, and yeah there were elements of its attitude that bugged me quite a bit.
** out of Five
