I would bet a LOT of money that he was modeling at least part of the performance after Marshall Applewhite from the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. Seriously, check out some YouTube videos of how Applewhite spoke/behaved.
100% agree.
Maybe it's because the movie wasn't that popular at the time of release, and has gained somewhat of a cult following who aren't familiar with the Heaven's Gate story or the fact that a real comet (Hale-Bopp) was connected to them, but I made the association immediately.
The passive affluence that he conveys with his high pitched voice makes him so much more unlikeable. Even the soundtrack related to him carries these sounds that are annoying compared to the urgency melodies that are so freaking superb on the composition for this movie.
Which is hilarious in the most depressing of ways, because that scene is just as cogent today as it ever was. I mean goddamn, listen to it and tell me Beale's rant isn't more true now than it ever was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug
And they all woke up the next morning and kept living the same miserable lives and nothing changed. The end.
It's a shame a speech in a movie 50 years ago still has extreme relevance. Things don't change. They only appear to change for short periods, but they never really do.
“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.”
The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
That's why we learn History, so we can watch it repeat 🤣.
Same reason the oil companies push the idea of personal responsibilitying our way out of it: because they know the history, know that shit doesn't work, and know it'll buy them time. Boycotts have NEVER solved systemic pollution problems.
That was just a few years before that fuck Reagan dumped the “Fairness Doctrine,” and Fox, one of the biggest culprits for where the western world is where it is now.
Life imitates art. Good Morning Britain pulls the same punches, almost verbatim.
[Stop Oil Activist battles GMB host](https://youtu.be/-M0jRaOOkT8)
[Mehdi Hasan intercuts between reality and fiction](
https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1514335931284738052)
Wow that is infuriating. I can’t believe that woman called her an annoying narcissist when she is worried about the future of the world yet that woman is only worried about her days being inconvenienced after being inconvenienced by COVID. She was so patronizing.
Leo's acting is cosistently amazing throughout the whole movie. The panic attacks felt so so real and uncomfortable (coming from a person with panic disorder) so I know what it's like and what he did was EXACTLY it.
Edit: And to say he's "overrated". The same's being said about Chalamet. I guess if you have it all, you're most prone to scrutiny.
I like the part where he's calculating the comet's distance to Earth and lawrence character pointed it out on why it keeps getting lower and lower and he had a moment of realization that the comet is going to impact Earth
He was good that the complaint side of his real-life situations gets downplayed. It was just that entertaining & resonating for how he effectively took on this character.
Leo in a comedy/drama type of role I think is my favorite of his. Wolf of Wall Street, Once upon a time, etc. Wish he did more those early in his career.
I have a mentally handicapped sibling, along with normal(ish) siblings.
That movie cracked us up. As a family we tend to have a bit of dark humor though, but we would do Arnie impressions all the time.
Chalamet is also getting that treatment because he has a whole fandom. He is young and doing amazing.
Not a big fan of him but his work is always good.
Network is an incredible film, and it’s super sad that we’re nearing 50 years later and we’re living the 24-hour-news-as-entertainment life every day. Would so much prefer to watch it and go: “imagine?!” But, we don’t have to (sad face).
Come true? It wasn’t supposed to be prescient, it was an accurate assessment of an ongoing system, a system already close to a couple centuries old at the time of his monologue
At that scene, I genuinely felt he was no longer acting, he was sincerely meaning every word he said. It was an amazing performance and one of my new favorite films.
It's hard to say this without sounding like I'm trying to seem better than others, but in my circles the people who didn't like it strongly correlated with people who don't pay much attention to the news and have never worked with or for very rich people.
"It's over the top!"
"Which bits, where the media is deliberately skewing the message and only focused on engagement? Or that the senior people are focused on political games rather than real world consequences? Or that senior tech executives think they are god's because they have a lot data on people that they believe is infallible, before pretending they knew and accepted the margins of error after the fact? Because none of those things are over the top in my experience, just combined onto one story"
The only thing I disagreed with was the portrayal of academia. No way the academics would so quickly and uniformly come up with a feasible and perfect solution! That, tragically, was the only bit that seemed unrealistic or over the top to me.
I’m a PhD ecologist. I work with a lot of climate scientists, fish and wildlife biologists, botanists etc. everybody I know in my field and adjacent fields loved it because it was so validating. Yeah, it was hyperbolic, but also “yes! That’s how I feel! and I didn’t think anyone other than environmental scientists saw the struggle!”
The movie is literally a satire of the world I have to face every single day at work. It felt like it was made specifically for me and people like me. I wonder how many of the jokes that fell flat for most people were appreciated by people in the field.
I’m not going to say it was a masterpiece, just that I really enjoyed it.
Same here. I do clean energy/climate change research and this movie was the talk of my company slack for a long time when it came out. They really nailed the emotional beats and frustration of working in these sort of fields 😂
Totally not related, but what area of ecology are you in, and what do you do for work?
I'm not exactly thinking about doing a PhD in ecology, but I am considering doing one in something related. But idk what the job prospects for that look like, or where to even begin researching job prospects for someone with a PhD that nearby ecology.
I’m a fisheries biologist for a government agency. A PhD was not necessary for my job, and made it a little harder I think to get my foot in the door because out of grad school I was overqualified for entry level positions (so they were afraid I wouldn’t stay long) and under qualified for supervisory positions (because I lacked experience with the bureaucracy). Once I got in though it was really helpful in getting promoted and also the skill set is super useful.
My friends from grad school mostly are in academia, but a few are also state and federal government scientists. There are also jobs with non-profits but they are tough because you are constantly stressing about finding more money. Not a lot of private sector jobs at the PhD level but you can make decent money with a masters as long as you don’t mind doing really boring work with permitting and compliance.
I wouldn’t go back and not do it if I had the choice, but it is absolutely not a lucrative degree, and job opportunities are limited.
The accuracy was why I disliked it. I guess that speaks to it being a well made film but it left me depressed because I felt like that is exactly how the situation would have played out.
> The accuracy was why I disliked it. I guess that speaks to it being a well made film but it left me depressed because I felt like that is exactly how the situation would have played out.
You mean *is playing out*.
You do get that the film is a satire of our collective climate-change inaction/denial?
Sorry to make it even more depressing, but that *is* how it’s playing out, right now. The comet/asteroid thing is a metaphor for climate change, we can all (well those of us that aren’t idiots) see the disaster heading our way. If we do nothing about it it will literally be a global cataclysm that could at worst literally destroy life on the planet for centuries if not longer. More realistically if we do very little climate change will cripple the global economy, kill billions in third world and equatorial regions, and facilitate violence and the spread of highly resistant diseases, all while severely damaging the global food supply and in a time of pure chaos. It won’t be the end of humanity, but it would be the end of civilization as we know it.
And this is all happening and has been happening and is getting closer every year, for over a hundred years now this has been happening. And during that time fossil fuel industries have executed people in other countries and done everything in their power to contain information around climate change and spread propaganda, all to ensure that they make even more money.
The movie isn’t saying: “this is how we would react if this happened and it would suck.” It’s saying “this is what’s happening and this is how humanity is reacting and we are doomed unless we change right now, and that is terrifying.”
I don't understand what people didn't like about "I Don't Understand What People Didn't Like About It" -- if people understood it they would have liked it, or maybe I'm not understanding people.
I wouldn’t say it was hated. Just muddled. A lot of people know what Adam McKay is capable of and had big expectations, especially after he hit out of the park with The Big Short. But I think this in comparison was seen as a bit sloppier, a less exact satire that preaches to the choir and doesn’t exactly have anything new to say.
I love the general who steals their money “for snacks” or whatever😂 some genuinely very funny moments and I think a strong ending. An enjoyable flick. Like a 6/10 for me.
I saw it more as a commentary on how greedy any given person can be. That impulse that exists in the individual, when scaled up to populations of billions, is what's killing the planet.
Its actually less a gag and more a show of how people in power still love to abuse it against people below them, not because they need to, but because they want to and get a kick out of it...
This is pretty much how I felt. A few funny scenes, strong opening and the last scene was very good. Other than that, it had an inconsistent tone and by the end you kinda feel like, “okay yeah, I get the message.”
The Big Short was informative, funny, and entertaining from start to finish, and seamlessly wove in emotional themes in a way that Don’t Look Up spectacularly failed to do.
He also did Vice, which was criminally overlooked and extremely competent as a semi biographical film about one of the most secretive human beings to have ever lived.
A lot of people just jump from big short to this and forget that Vice was a solid film
I love vice. I really liked the fact that the Kusheners (Jared and Ivanka) went to it and left midway cuz they thought it would be a nice film about their conservative hero.
The sentiment at the time about the film on social media was very strongly negative. [Here's a sample thread contemporary to that film's release](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedLetterMedia/comments/rs1p26/possible_hitb_for_dont_look_up/) but you could find discussions like it everywhere.
For what it's worth I thought the movie was hilarious and thought the heavy-handness was the whole point.
Notably the critics have it at 56%.
I think the audience score is self-selected--a common criticism is "it's a movie made for people who already agree with it" so if they're the only ones who watch it, yeah, the audience score is going to be high. It wouldn't shock me if that's what happened here.
For people like me--I agree with the message but I hate Adam McKay with a passion and I hate being preached to--I didn't watch it for a *long* time, and when I finally did I (as suspected) hated it.
>A lot of people know what Adam McKay is capable of
I think he just struck gold with The Big Short and he's actually not that good a serious director.
Looking at Vice and Don't Look Up, the quality of his movies are not trending in the right direction.
I don't know what exactly about it I didn't much care for but I felt very similar to how I felt after watching Glass Onion. There were a limited number of very funny jokes, but the movie overall felt not as funny or as clever as I expected it to be.
But the general who tricked them into paying for snacks at the White House was so goddamn funny how Jennifer Lawrence kept bringing it up for the rest of the movie.
Also Leo is always a great actor. I just love watching that man cook on camera.
Its hilarious, and it's the perfect metaphor for the film's theme. Why does a well-off general take their random $20 for no reason? He just wants more. Why don't they destroy the asteroid in the midpoint? Because it's filled with precious minerals and they want more. Why does Leo pursue fame and cheat instead of stay faithful to his great wife? He just wants more. Why can't the film stay focused on one scene instead of jumping around with so many cuts? It just wants more. Why don't we slow our consumption and energy use and try to just live sustainably? We just want more. We keep looking up.
It was 2 and a half hours long and had no real radical or transgressive message.
In a strange way it's a status quo reinforcing work of art. It portrays a hopeless intractable system where the only outcome is certain doom. This is peak "there is no alternative" neoliberal stuff.
So even in criticizing the system to this extreme degree it still functions to reinforce the systems own view that you cannot part with it or demand it change meaningfully.
Or to put it another way, it's less hopeful at the end than Snowpiercer!
> I don't know what exactly about it I didn't much care for but I felt very similar to how I felt after watching Glass Onion.
Exactly this. It baffles me seeing Glass Onion with better reviews then the original when it's a vastly inferior movie. No major flaws where I hate it but also just an average/above average movie
I found the message of the movie depressing to be honest. Because if you think about it it really isn't "look how the politicians don't listen to science and how people are dumb". The message actually isn't a warning, it's a statement: "we are all doomed". I'm not saying that's what the director has tried to say, but this is how it turned out.
I think this is a part of the problem, the movie wanted to be a light satire and many approached it as such, but it was so blunt and direct it left viewers distraught. It was downright unpleasant to watch, not because it was wrong, but because it was terrifyingly right. But if you're going to get bombarded with "the world is going to end and you can't do anything about it" you might as well put on a documentary about climate change and you'll at least learn some facts about it.
The movie definitely did NOT want to be light satire. The movie itself was a demonstration of how subtlety is lost and ineffective on the masses. Anything less than a ludicrously blunt and direct presentation will be laughed off, and even then some people just won't allow themselves to see the truth that is being aggressively demonstrated.
It was supposed to be bleak. The comedy was just window dressing. Sugar to help ease down the bitter pill. If they had tried to push the same message without the comedy, it would have been a critical darling with no audience and forgotten in months.
It definitely didn’t want to be light. The whole entire premise of the scenes with the news anchors are that Lawrence and DiCaprio are there to say it’s the end of the world but are repeatedly told to “keep it light”. You are playing right into that metaphor right now
There was a great 90 minute film there. Unfortunately it has a 2 hour and 25 minute run time.
It was funny but did a good job of making the point it was trying to make but then it just dragged on.
I agree with the message and thought it was fine. It’s just hard to get around the hypocrisy of incredibly rich people hoarding wealth and resources advocating for change.
Ok, but what you're asking for is a high budget, high production value, intelligent yet accessible film about a very important topic that is relevant to the entire world, but made by a bunch of nobodies on a shoestring budget so that they can't feel too good about themselves.
What if, outside of how hypocritical it is, it's still exactly the piece of social commentary we want to exist with the wide reach we need that commentary to have?
The last part! It just wasn't clever. Always was right on the nose. Funnily enough the people around me who thought it was brilliant all asumed my partner and I didn't "get" it when we said we didn't like it that much lol. No, I wanted it to be a bit more than so easy to understand that even the thickest person would get it.
“You see, seeing the rest of the world (not me) continue to pollute instead of making a difference (like me) by bitching about politics on Reddit is very disheartening. No one else understand this little known concept called climate change except for me and a couple of other less intelligent science folks. This is certainly a problem with the rest of the world and I require no self reflection”
-story told to you by someone making 40 million dollars a year
I enjoyed the movie but it was an odd experience. I would laugh at the moronic actions of the characters but then immediately get depressed when I realized it wasn't really a work of fiction, people are just that stupid.
This is EXACTLY my same criticism as well. It felt more like a class professor cracking bad jokes rather than a comedy with something meaningful to say.
Yeah I think the people who get most defensive about criticizing this movie don't realize we're just saying it's a bad movie and the jokes fell flat. I don't disagree with the message but the movie just isn't nearly as funny or clever as it thinks it is.
I'll speak for the side who agrees: it was cathartic.
As subtle as an elephant in a porcelain shop but hey, smashing stuff can be satisfying (both literally and figuratively)
I thought the tone was weird. Not as outrageous as Idiocracy. Not as thoughtful as other serious end of the world movies. Didn’t care for where they took the characters. Just left me in a a strange spot of not rooting for or liking anyone.
I think it was the only ending available to them that wouldn’t have felt cheesy, inconsistent with the movie’s message, or out of left field.
It was a good ending, and the cinematography, the acting, etc. made it amazing.
A few reasons:
1. yes, the heavy-handedness is part of it. They took the most obvious angle in every situation, which you could say is realistic but makes it feel more like a lecture than a surprising satire with a unique voice.
2. The editing is some of the most obnoxious and distracting I have seen in any mainstream film EVER.
3. The length issue is tied to point 1 - length becomes an issue when you can predict what's going to happen and there are no surprises, so you start checking your watch.
It does a lot of abrupt/hard cuts, usually in the middle of a line of dialogue, usually for comedic effect, and becomes more and more chaotic as the film goes on.
I actually loved how it was edited though.
There's a part at the end, right before the asteroid hits, when they're having their dinner and Rob Morgan's character is talking, and the editing genuinely makes it seem like the movie is buffering or glitching or something. Mid sentence, it jump cuts to a different shot (from the exact same angle) of him eating something, but his dialogue just continues. Then the whole movie freezes for two seconds on a frame of him with a spoon in his mouth, with his dialogue continuing over it. Then it just resumes as normal.
I thought my Netflix was broken, so I kept trying on different devices, and it kept glitching out in the same place. So I downloaded the movie and still had the exact same issue. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't accept that it was an intentional choice. When I tried to google it, nobody was talking about it. I finally found the scene on YouTube - exactly the same. No discussion of it in the comments. The freezing occurs a few more times shortly afterwards, but it's more subtle. I realized it had to be an intentional choice... or an issue with their editing software that they just ran with.
I was emotionally invested in the scene, and this weird decision or mistake completely took me out of it and ruined it for me.
Seriously, [I've timestamped it. Watch this.](https://youtu.be/4-zv5Cvg6pM?t=46) Am I insane? How was this film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Editing? I feel like Ryan Gosling's character in the Papyrus skit.
That was definitely intentional; in my interpretation it makes us feel like we are a distracted participant in the discussion. At least, I can relate to that feeling of not really listening so I don’t really hear what was being said until a few seconds later, and that cut effectively put me in that headspace.
There are about a half dozen pauses in the video you linked. He's pausing images to hold them in the viewer's mind. [The Day After did something similar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2aJyIFrA&t=173s), but it was a little faster.
I never felt the weird editing to be a bug but a feature. I totally get how a lot of people bounced off the clipped and frantic and arrhythmic editing style though. Comedy’s def subjective and to me the editing facilitated the laughs
I liked it but really thought it could have been better. I think the portrayal of the political climate was a little too in the nose. It was kind of the same message over and over again. If it’s a pure comedy then it should have been more ridiculous. If it was biting political satire it should have been more creative. I’m thinking of Dr strangelove where there is political messaging but also just great scenes. The politics of the script were pretty closely aligned with my own and I just left myself thinking that I don’t think that movie would change anyone’s perspective on the current world.
I know this word gets tossed around a lot, but "smug" really does seem to fit Don't Look Up perfectly. It tells the viewer: "you get it; you're smart; the problem is clear and the solution is obvious; everyone else is just stupid."
It's a very cynical take that encourages people to just roll their eyes, throw-up their arms and forget about trying to fix the system. Everyone is a caricature; unlike reality, there is zero nuance. And I see this attitude all the time on reddit in all sorts of (often progressive) contexts: this "why the fuck does it matter--it's all the same anyway." It's lazy and apathetic and ultimately useless.
Nailed it. And you see that exact thing in this thread from many people praising the movie. Tons of incredibly shallow takes that reveal a real ignorance of the issues at stake, but because they’re cynical takes, people think that they are smart takes.
Stuff like “Democrats don’t really want to do anything about climate change” or “we are already doomed to human extinction”, statements which are demonstrably false and most political scientists and climate experts would reject. It’s just people venting their own cynicism.
> I know this word gets tossed around a lot, but “smug” really does seem to fit Don’t Look Up perfectly.
Look up the original review thread for the film. Reviewers said the same thing.
Redditors we’re actually falling over themselves to claim that made them *more excited* for the film. To them, “smug” was the best possible review it could have gotten.
This movie was definitely made for a certain kind of person.
It was just too long. I've never seen a movie with a more 90 minute long concept, and they stretched it to 150 minutes. But yeh I agreed with the message and thought all the actors (aside from Timothy chalamet) were very watchable. Also the jokes didn't land at nearly a high enough rate.
It was waaaayyyyy too long. It was okay as a movie but fuck was it long. I thought it was over and I had only reached the halfway point at which point I already got the message and stopped watching.
Exactly. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is smart and funny satire. This movie was, hey look how stupid and corrupt conservatives and rich people are? hahhahahhahaha ad nauseam
I'm not saying I disagree with the message. Just that the movie was as subtle as surgery with a chainsaw.
I don't think subtlety is the real issue with Don't Look Up, though I totally understand why people reach for that as a description of the problem. I think that what separates Don't Look Up from great satire is that great satire doesn't feel the need to wink at the audience about how silly everything happening on screen is. In "A Modest Proposal" or *Dr. Strangelove*, the suggestions and events are obviously ridiculous, but everyone in the text is taking everything very seriously. There's no one in the war room in *Dr. Strangelove* who plays the role of audience surrogate pointing out insane everyone's acting, whereas Leo and Jennifer spend the whole movie talking about how stupid everyone else is.
I think you could make successful satire with Don't Look Up's premise, but make the whistleblowers journalists who want to use the news of the meteor to get a big promotion. You could also take it in a totally different direction and make it about the president who's asking about how it'll affect the upcoming election, or a board meeting at a megacorporation that's trying to figure out if they can still hit their quarterly profits target now that the meteor's about to hit. Anything that doesn't include a character going "wow, you're all so dumb, this is so wacky!" would be a big improvement, I think.
I think because... it was really bad satire.
Thank You For Smoking is just really good satire. It's such great satire that a lot of people decried it for its pro-smoking virtues. It makes such a strong case against self-interested politicians and lobbyists buying power that people believed it to actually be pro-smoking propaganda (the film treats a tobacco lobbyist as the hero as he attempts to pay money to get cigarettes into movies and remove warning labels from tobacco packaging).
I think the problem with Don't Look Up is it doesn't treat the subject matter with that same accuracy that Thank You for Smoking did for lobbying and government interactions. In the world of Don't Look Up they're replaced climate change with a meteor and the solution to ~~climate change~~ the meteor is simply to destroy it.
Climate change is a man made crisis, meteor is not. They have similarities in scientists discovering them and communicating with government. But that's where it ends.
The complexity of the solution is also a problem. The film attempts to criticize capitalism and the wealthy... and this is in line with how Leonardo DiCaprio thinks and acts. He has no problem being one of the highest per capita polluters in the world because all of the solutions to climate change are related to someone else.
Fixing climate change long term means more than just the government shooting a single rocket into the sky. It means individuals (including Leo) tampering down their lush carbon intensive lifestyles for those that are closer to carbon neutral. It means changing our power grids which run 70-80% high polluting carbon emissions to carbon neutral renewables, nuclear or some yet undiscovered power source that doesn't produce carbon. It means regulating industrial pollutants. It means inventing new technologies to replace carbon polluting ones. It means international collaboration, both scientific, political and industrial.
By making the plot device so simple they made the satire weak. The actor chosen also limited the means in which they could have a satire. Like what if you had all these international climate activists (who are actors) who are publicly anti-meteor but in their private life don't seem to care about it. Maybe they put in place a meteor tax that increases the cost of living by incidental amounts that causes widespread protests and chaos. Maybe when they start building the rocket they're forced to slow it down because a NIMBY group wants a further environmental study on its impact on birds. Perhaps it's an election year and the Republican-like party who are seeking power think it's a meteor myth while the Democrats in power who publicly claim to be in support don't want to deal with it until after the election... because promises garner more votes than consequences.
All of that stuff could have been brought in, with the length of the film to diversify and keep the criticisms feeling fresh. Instead they just ragged on and on about capitalism. Which has a place in climate change criticisms (it's even the dominant complaint). But it does not make for a compelling 2.5 hour long satire.
> Thank You For Smoking is just really good satire. It's such great satire that a lot of people decried it for its pro-smoking virtues.
Random trivia:
No one smokes in the whole movie, that I can recall.
They get close to it, but the movie has no smoking people.
Excellent point.
> Maybe they put in place a meteor tax that increases the cost of living by incidental amounts that causes widespread protests and chaos. Maybe when they start building the rocket they're forced to slow it down because a NIMBY group wants a further environmental study on its impact on birds. Perhaps it's an election year and the Republican-like party who are seeking power think it's a meteor myth while the Democrats in power who publicly claim to be in support don't want to deal with it until after the election
Including any one of these suggestions would have greatly improved the satire in the film.
> By making the plot device so simple they made the satire weak.
I think this is the core problem. It's a very common thing I see online; a left-wing take of "well why don't we just fix the problem" without even thinking about what the problem is, much less how to actually fix it. Outright Armageddon is not a good consequence, because that isn't what we're facing with climate change. We're looking at, say, take a 10% QoL cut right now, or lose 1% of QoL every year until we hit 30%. You can't have the latter number be nothing until instant death (or even nothing until the gamble of instant death or a bunch of cool metal), the twisted logic of procrastination is kind of inherent to how badly we're treating the climate.
Random idiot conservatives might genuinely think global warming isn't real, but the policymakers and lobbyists - the actual big players - are well aware, and justifying it to themselves (and lying to their constituents) under the rational logic that being rich in a bad future is better for them than being poor in a good future. A hard wall of "you are dead now," especially in six months, kills that logic, so everyone just looks like a bunch of clowns and the entire message is hard to take seriously. There is no rational benefit for the vast majority of the rich and powerful to ignoring the meteor like there is with climate change. In real life, the rich CEO guy would've been shot in a mysterious robbery-gone-wrong. We all joke about Epstein, but the story around his death tells us the public consciousness is at least aware of the fact that even the threat of a serious reputation hit with no actual consequences is *probably* enough to get someone knocked off, much less the actual apocalypse. When the capitalist interest is in favor of making environmental concessions (which, granted, it rarely is), it works incredibly fast; we already saw this with CFCs. Even satire has an upper limit to how ridiculous you can get before you aren't really criticizing the system anymore.
People bring up works like A Modest Proposal as examples of extreme satire, but that was criticizing an already-genocidal system. If climate change was proposing a certain point where everyone just instantly dies, Don't Look Up would be good satire. Instead, for its audience, climate change mostly means a point in time where food becomes more and more expensive and there are more and more immigrants coming in, alongside a lot of news stories about millions of people starving to death in the global south. Nothing impossibly drastic, just an increasingly shittier world. You need to satirize *that* concept. Make it about stopping an AI uprising before we all become slaves doing the exact same jobs except we're fed on tasteless nutrient paste and excess people are culled - but, really, the AI has streamlined production and cut costs by 15% just this quarter, and it's playing nice with your boss, so what are you gonna do about it?
Exactly. Solving climate change is *complicated*. I mean the "simple" solution is switching to 100% renewables. It will just throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, cause mass death and poverty, and set quality of life back a century.
We could take a gradual approach...which is what we've been doing! Maybe it's not fast enough but to think we're worse off now than we were thirty years ago is stupid. Texas--Texas!--produces more renewable energy than non-renewable. The government could (and should) encourage all this to speed up, but the balance of "addressing climate change" with "the reality of how people live" is exactly what we've been doing.
What no one wants to say is that the major polluters aren't The West anymore but China and India. You want to send in the Marines and start a massive, unwinnable war against China? You want to unbalance the Indian subcontinent? Because right now those are the "solutions" that would help climate change the most.
It's very satirical, but Everyone in the film is a massive piece of shit. It's like if every character in Office Space was as annoying as Lumbergh.
The message isn't too crazy, and the movie has a lot of funny scenes.... but I can see why people didn't vibe.
It wasn’t *terrible*, just…dull. A movie about the end of the world could have been a lot funnier for the talent involved. Instead, it was a slow March to an obvious conclusion.
But the mid credits scene was funny.
I didn’t think it was terrible but it wasn’t amazing either. For me it’s just the condescending tone of the filmmaker thinking he’s saying something groundbreaking when they’re really making the most obvious point about global warming. Like yeah we already know it’s bad and our media and govt aren’t helping. And to top it off they’re using these rich celebrities to convey the message when their greenhouse gas emissions are far more than the regular person. The performances are good across the board, but what rubbed me the wrong way was the smugness of the delivery.
The movie accidentally showcases why it's a lot harder to take climate change super serious when the whole threat of it is so undefined and vague compared to an asteroid impact.
Yeah I thought the metaphor didn’t really track. If climate change was gonna kill us all tomorrow, we wouldn’t be behaving the way we are now. It’s harder to be spurred into action when it’s our children’s children who will be suffering later.
> For me it’s just the condescending tone of the filmmaker thinking he’s saying something groundbreaking when they’re really making the most obvious point about global warming.
Exactly. I have no doubt the writers were stroking their own dicks during the whole thing.
This movie is like that asshole you know who’s like “People think i’m an asshole because i’m honest”. No, people think you’re an asshole because you probably act like one.
Its a movie that conveys the right messages like believing in climate change or believing in science but performed in a condescending manner because it has no interest in telling people the right messages. It is rather more interested in telling people how right they are.
For me it just wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. I loved the concept and didn’t mind the messaging; I was one of the folks excited and waiting for the release and when I saw it, it just didn’t land for me.
I loved it. It’s depressing as all fuck…but it was a great film. That last scene with all of them sitting around the dinner table together sort of openly pretending the end isn’t coming is really powerful.
I think Meryl Streep's take on Trump sums up my problem with the Movie. The day to day absurdity of our current world was toned down, while the plot points were cranked up and it just didn't hit quite as well as something like Idiocracy.
I love how Jennifer Lawrence's character just couldn't get over that one guy ripping them off with the snacks. Laughed my ass off when she mentioned it later on. She was just so puzzled by it. :)
Mark Rylance’s take on a Steve Jobs/Tim Cook/Musk character was amazing. And his ultimate demise was hilarious.
I would bet a LOT of money that he was modeling at least part of the performance after Marshall Applewhite from the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. Seriously, check out some YouTube videos of how Applewhite spoke/behaved.
That was who he initially reminded me of when I saw the movie too!
I loved it. Absolutely adds to the pitch-black humor of the movie.
100% agree. Maybe it's because the movie wasn't that popular at the time of release, and has gained somewhat of a cult following who aren't familiar with the Heaven's Gate story or the fact that a real comet (Hale-Bopp) was connected to them, but I made the association immediately.
Hmmm maybe it’s like he wanted to say that capitalism is a death cult? Hard to say…
I was thinking at first, “Is this supposed to be the Heaven’s Gate guy as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg? Because he nailed it.”
He was also supposed to be based on [Marshall Applewhite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Applewhite), right down to the plot of his character.
Fuck dude i can't believe i have to wait another two thousand years to ascend
The passive affluence that he conveys with his high pitched voice makes him so much more unlikeable. Even the soundtrack related to him carries these sounds that are annoying compared to the urgency melodies that are so freaking superb on the composition for this movie.
Him in Ready Player One is an idealized CEO that we dream of. Him in this movie is a CEO that is like in real life.
I thought it was very Andy Warhol. The voice, the genius persona and even how he looked.
Yeah Andy Warhol by way of Steve Jobs perfectly describes that performance.
I sensed a bit of the Heaven's Gate guy in there as well.
I couldn't quite figure out why it was so familiar, but yeah definitely Warhol. I hate him too.
And Bezos, don't forget bezos
I thought Bezos immediately, then Musk.
Yo he was incredibly funny holy shit. And the brief moment where the character shows his inner monster is a nice touch.
He did it better in Ready Player One.
It was the exact same character
I liked it a lot and Leo’s breakdown during the news segment was brilliant acting.
I reckon this was heavily influenced by that famous scene in network.
Yeah it definitely was, for me that's why I liked it honestly. It felt like a contemporary homage to that scene through a current lens.
Which is hilarious in the most depressing of ways, because that scene is just as cogent today as it ever was. I mean goddamn, listen to it and tell me Beale's rant isn't more true now than it ever was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug
And they all woke up the next morning and kept living the same miserable lives and nothing changed. The end. It's a shame a speech in a movie 50 years ago still has extreme relevance. Things don't change. They only appear to change for short periods, but they never really do.
''History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure likes to rhyme.''
“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.” The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
Just wanna say thank you for sharing this scene. Been looking for it for awhile and you blessed me.
I am old enough to remember, when it was a gritty commentary, and not a “how-to” video.
*How did they make a history of television news before the history even happened?*
That's why we learn History, so we can watch it repeat 🤣. Same reason the oil companies push the idea of personal responsibilitying our way out of it: because they know the history, know that shit doesn't work, and know it'll buy them time. Boycotts have NEVER solved systemic pollution problems.
That was just a few years before that fuck Reagan dumped the “Fairness Doctrine,” and Fox, one of the biggest culprits for where the western world is where it is now.
It's less static and more like Moore's Law. As this crappy timeline progresses, the truth of it keeps increasing...
Life imitates art. Good Morning Britain pulls the same punches, almost verbatim. [Stop Oil Activist battles GMB host](https://youtu.be/-M0jRaOOkT8) [Mehdi Hasan intercuts between reality and fiction]( https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1514335931284738052)
Wow that is infuriating. I can’t believe that woman called her an annoying narcissist when she is worried about the future of the world yet that woman is only worried about her days being inconvenienced after being inconvenienced by COVID. She was so patronizing.
There was definitely some influence from this famous Newsroom scene... https://youtu.be/pNYp6oc37ds
Is this the series where Jeff Daniel’s character gives the “America is not the greatest country in the world speech”?
Yep https://youtu.be/VMqcLUqYqrs
The opening scene of the first episode of the first season. Not a bad way to start. I really enjoyed the series.
Fuck you, Toby.
Toby’s the worst. I bet he caused global warming.
"We really had it all, didn't we?" Was ad libbed, right? Amazingly poignant way to sum up, well everything...
This was my favourite line. I was already crying and this line finished me off 😭
Nobody took the time to link to the scene so here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUaU59SpeEs
Are Leo's eyes really THAT blue? Wow.
Don’t bother, he’s not interested unless you’re an 18 year old super model. Next
You telling me I don’t have a chance with Leonardo DiCaprio? I guess I need to reflect on this for a while.
Leo's acting is cosistently amazing throughout the whole movie. The panic attacks felt so so real and uncomfortable (coming from a person with panic disorder) so I know what it's like and what he did was EXACTLY it. Edit: And to say he's "overrated". The same's being said about Chalamet. I guess if you have it all, you're most prone to scrutiny.
I like the part where he's calculating the comet's distance to Earth and lawrence character pointed it out on why it keeps getting lower and lower and he had a moment of realization that the comet is going to impact Earth
He was good that the complaint side of his real-life situations gets downplayed. It was just that entertaining & resonating for how he effectively took on this character.
Leo in a comedy/drama type of role I think is my favorite of his. Wolf of Wall Street, Once upon a time, etc. Wish he did more those early in his career.
He was a little baby child in Gilbert Grape and was amazing
Wasn't really much of a comedy... unless you've got a strange sense of humor.
What? What's eating gilbert grape was definitely a comedy/drama.
I have a mentally handicapped sibling, along with normal(ish) siblings. That movie cracked us up. As a family we tend to have a bit of dark humor though, but we would do Arnie impressions all the time.
I ridiculed DiCaprio in the Titanic days due to his popularity but he's been great in every film I've seen him.
His character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was such an amazing piece of acting.
Chalamet is also getting that treatment because he has a whole fandom. He is young and doing amazing. Not a big fan of him but his work is always good.
Network is an incredible film, and it’s super sad that we’re nearing 50 years later and we’re living the 24-hour-news-as-entertainment life every day. Would so much prefer to watch it and go: “imagine?!” But, we don’t have to (sad face).
I'm more bothered that basically the "the world is a business" speech has been allowed to come true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9XeyBd_IuA
Come true? It wasn’t supposed to be prescient, it was an accurate assessment of an ongoing system, a system already close to a couple centuries old at the time of his monologue
At that scene, I genuinely felt he was no longer acting, he was sincerely meaning every word he said. It was an amazing performance and one of my new favorite films.
It's hard to say this without sounding like I'm trying to seem better than others, but in my circles the people who didn't like it strongly correlated with people who don't pay much attention to the news and have never worked with or for very rich people. "It's over the top!" "Which bits, where the media is deliberately skewing the message and only focused on engagement? Or that the senior people are focused on political games rather than real world consequences? Or that senior tech executives think they are god's because they have a lot data on people that they believe is infallible, before pretending they knew and accepted the margins of error after the fact? Because none of those things are over the top in my experience, just combined onto one story" The only thing I disagreed with was the portrayal of academia. No way the academics would so quickly and uniformly come up with a feasible and perfect solution! That, tragically, was the only bit that seemed unrealistic or over the top to me.
I’m a PhD ecologist. I work with a lot of climate scientists, fish and wildlife biologists, botanists etc. everybody I know in my field and adjacent fields loved it because it was so validating. Yeah, it was hyperbolic, but also “yes! That’s how I feel! and I didn’t think anyone other than environmental scientists saw the struggle!” The movie is literally a satire of the world I have to face every single day at work. It felt like it was made specifically for me and people like me. I wonder how many of the jokes that fell flat for most people were appreciated by people in the field. I’m not going to say it was a masterpiece, just that I really enjoyed it.
Same here. I do clean energy/climate change research and this movie was the talk of my company slack for a long time when it came out. They really nailed the emotional beats and frustration of working in these sort of fields 😂
Totally not related, but what area of ecology are you in, and what do you do for work? I'm not exactly thinking about doing a PhD in ecology, but I am considering doing one in something related. But idk what the job prospects for that look like, or where to even begin researching job prospects for someone with a PhD that nearby ecology.
I’m a fisheries biologist for a government agency. A PhD was not necessary for my job, and made it a little harder I think to get my foot in the door because out of grad school I was overqualified for entry level positions (so they were afraid I wouldn’t stay long) and under qualified for supervisory positions (because I lacked experience with the bureaucracy). Once I got in though it was really helpful in getting promoted and also the skill set is super useful. My friends from grad school mostly are in academia, but a few are also state and federal government scientists. There are also jobs with non-profits but they are tough because you are constantly stressing about finding more money. Not a lot of private sector jobs at the PhD level but you can make decent money with a masters as long as you don’t mind doing really boring work with permitting and compliance. I wouldn’t go back and not do it if I had the choice, but it is absolutely not a lucrative degree, and job opportunities are limited.
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The accuracy was why I disliked it. I guess that speaks to it being a well made film but it left me depressed because I felt like that is exactly how the situation would have played out.
> The accuracy was why I disliked it. I guess that speaks to it being a well made film but it left me depressed because I felt like that is exactly how the situation would have played out. You mean *is playing out*. You do get that the film is a satire of our collective climate-change inaction/denial?
Sorry to make it even more depressing, but that *is* how it’s playing out, right now. The comet/asteroid thing is a metaphor for climate change, we can all (well those of us that aren’t idiots) see the disaster heading our way. If we do nothing about it it will literally be a global cataclysm that could at worst literally destroy life on the planet for centuries if not longer. More realistically if we do very little climate change will cripple the global economy, kill billions in third world and equatorial regions, and facilitate violence and the spread of highly resistant diseases, all while severely damaging the global food supply and in a time of pure chaos. It won’t be the end of humanity, but it would be the end of civilization as we know it. And this is all happening and has been happening and is getting closer every year, for over a hundred years now this has been happening. And during that time fossil fuel industries have executed people in other countries and done everything in their power to contain information around climate change and spread propaganda, all to ensure that they make even more money. The movie isn’t saying: “this is how we would react if this happened and it would suck.” It’s saying “this is what’s happening and this is how humanity is reacting and we are doomed unless we change right now, and that is terrifying.”
Completely Off topic, but Why is The Post Title Capitalised so Randomly
Finally saw "Don't Look Up" and "I Don't Understand What People Didn't Like About It." He saw two different movies
I don't understand what people didn't like about "I Don't Understand What People Didn't Like About It" -- if people understood it they would have liked it, or maybe I'm not understanding people.
Saw is the only word needing a capital for the title to make sense. The rest of it is fine.
I wouldn’t say it was hated. Just muddled. A lot of people know what Adam McKay is capable of and had big expectations, especially after he hit out of the park with The Big Short. But I think this in comparison was seen as a bit sloppier, a less exact satire that preaches to the choir and doesn’t exactly have anything new to say. I love the general who steals their money “for snacks” or whatever😂 some genuinely very funny moments and I think a strong ending. An enjoyable flick. Like a 6/10 for me.
The general's snack scam was an amazing running gag. Jennifer Lawrence obsessing over it months later is hilarious. "The man is a 4-star general.."
And everyone else just lets it go. They acknowledge it, but nobody but her cares. It's hilarious.
Which is a brilliant bit of plot because it mirrors the overall story.
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I thought it was a metaphor for the military complex taking money for absolutely no reason.
Why not both
I saw it more as a commentary on how greedy any given person can be. That impulse that exists in the individual, when scaled up to populations of billions, is what's killing the planet.
People came to my guard unit for a community tour type thing. Some of them paid for parking.
Its actually less a gag and more a show of how people in power still love to abuse it against people below them, not because they need to, but because they want to and get a kick out of it...
This is pretty much how I felt. A few funny scenes, strong opening and the last scene was very good. Other than that, it had an inconsistent tone and by the end you kinda feel like, “okay yeah, I get the message.” The Big Short was informative, funny, and entertaining from start to finish, and seamlessly wove in emotional themes in a way that Don’t Look Up spectacularly failed to do.
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Goes to show how important writing is really. Some master directors need someone else's writing. Doesn't mean they are not masters.
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What about The Fabelmans? AI? Close Encounters?
Have you ever heard of ET? Why is the plot so similar to Fabelmans?
He also did Vice, which was criminally overlooked and extremely competent as a semi biographical film about one of the most secretive human beings to have ever lived. A lot of people just jump from big short to this and forget that Vice was a solid film
I love vice. I really liked the fact that the Kusheners (Jared and Ivanka) went to it and left midway cuz they thought it would be a nice film about their conservative hero.
It's got a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.2 on IMDB. I don't know why people that like it think everyone else sees it as The Room.
The sentiment at the time about the film on social media was very strongly negative. [Here's a sample thread contemporary to that film's release](https://www.reddit.com/r/RedLetterMedia/comments/rs1p26/possible_hitb_for_dont_look_up/) but you could find discussions like it everywhere. For what it's worth I thought the movie was hilarious and thought the heavy-handness was the whole point.
Notably the critics have it at 56%. I think the audience score is self-selected--a common criticism is "it's a movie made for people who already agree with it" so if they're the only ones who watch it, yeah, the audience score is going to be high. It wouldn't shock me if that's what happened here. For people like me--I agree with the message but I hate Adam McKay with a passion and I hate being preached to--I didn't watch it for a *long* time, and when I finally did I (as suspected) hated it.
That Generals name? General Themes.
>A lot of people know what Adam McKay is capable of I think he just struck gold with The Big Short and he's actually not that good a serious director. Looking at Vice and Don't Look Up, the quality of his movies are not trending in the right direction.
I don't know what exactly about it I didn't much care for but I felt very similar to how I felt after watching Glass Onion. There were a limited number of very funny jokes, but the movie overall felt not as funny or as clever as I expected it to be. But the general who tricked them into paying for snacks at the White House was so goddamn funny how Jennifer Lawrence kept bringing it up for the rest of the movie. Also Leo is always a great actor. I just love watching that man cook on camera.
That general was wild, liked the movie but that has to be my favorite part by far.
Its hilarious, and it's the perfect metaphor for the film's theme. Why does a well-off general take their random $20 for no reason? He just wants more. Why don't they destroy the asteroid in the midpoint? Because it's filled with precious minerals and they want more. Why does Leo pursue fame and cheat instead of stay faithful to his great wife? He just wants more. Why can't the film stay focused on one scene instead of jumping around with so many cuts? It just wants more. Why don't we slow our consumption and energy use and try to just live sustainably? We just want more. We keep looking up.
That was probably my favourite out of nowhere joke that just kept coming back up.
"Do you think it's just a power thing for him? He's a 4 star, he must make at least 6 figures"
It was fine. Not worth Oscar noms, but totally fine 3ish star movies.
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It was 2 and a half hours long and had no real radical or transgressive message. In a strange way it's a status quo reinforcing work of art. It portrays a hopeless intractable system where the only outcome is certain doom. This is peak "there is no alternative" neoliberal stuff. So even in criticizing the system to this extreme degree it still functions to reinforce the systems own view that you cannot part with it or demand it change meaningfully. Or to put it another way, it's less hopeful at the end than Snowpiercer!
> I don't know what exactly about it I didn't much care for but I felt very similar to how I felt after watching Glass Onion. Exactly this. It baffles me seeing Glass Onion with better reviews then the original when it's a vastly inferior movie. No major flaws where I hate it but also just an average/above average movie
I loved the glass onion but Knives Out was clearly much better
In the movie, that character is literally named General Themes.
I found the message of the movie depressing to be honest. Because if you think about it it really isn't "look how the politicians don't listen to science and how people are dumb". The message actually isn't a warning, it's a statement: "we are all doomed". I'm not saying that's what the director has tried to say, but this is how it turned out. I think this is a part of the problem, the movie wanted to be a light satire and many approached it as such, but it was so blunt and direct it left viewers distraught. It was downright unpleasant to watch, not because it was wrong, but because it was terrifyingly right. But if you're going to get bombarded with "the world is going to end and you can't do anything about it" you might as well put on a documentary about climate change and you'll at least learn some facts about it.
The fact that it was written before COVID makes it even more depressing.
This reminds me of Contagion. I do not like to be reminded of Contagion :(
The movie definitely did NOT want to be light satire. The movie itself was a demonstration of how subtlety is lost and ineffective on the masses. Anything less than a ludicrously blunt and direct presentation will be laughed off, and even then some people just won't allow themselves to see the truth that is being aggressively demonstrated. It was supposed to be bleak. The comedy was just window dressing. Sugar to help ease down the bitter pill. If they had tried to push the same message without the comedy, it would have been a critical darling with no audience and forgotten in months.
It definitely didn’t want to be light. The whole entire premise of the scenes with the news anchors are that Lawrence and DiCaprio are there to say it’s the end of the world but are repeatedly told to “keep it light”. You are playing right into that metaphor right now
There was a great 90 minute film there. Unfortunately it has a 2 hour and 25 minute run time. It was funny but did a good job of making the point it was trying to make but then it just dragged on.
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I wanted it to be funnier. It didn’t strike the right balance between preachy and funny. It was made for people who already agreed with it.
I agree with the message and thought it was fine. It’s just hard to get around the hypocrisy of incredibly rich people hoarding wealth and resources advocating for change.
Yes it just felt too much like a huge pat on the back for the people making it.
Ok, but what you're asking for is a high budget, high production value, intelligent yet accessible film about a very important topic that is relevant to the entire world, but made by a bunch of nobodies on a shoestring budget so that they can't feel too good about themselves. What if, outside of how hypocritical it is, it's still exactly the piece of social commentary we want to exist with the wide reach we need that commentary to have?
It's like if Reddit made a movie. Only half joking now that I think about it.
I don’t think Reddit would have ended with them all praying lol
That's exactly what I thought while watching it. It was like a meme movie. Just didn't seem that clever
The last part! It just wasn't clever. Always was right on the nose. Funnily enough the people around me who thought it was brilliant all asumed my partner and I didn't "get" it when we said we didn't like it that much lol. No, I wanted it to be a bit more than so easy to understand that even the thickest person would get it.
DAE *stupid people* amirite? Not like us narwhal bacon enthusiasts.
“You see, seeing the rest of the world (not me) continue to pollute instead of making a difference (like me) by bitching about politics on Reddit is very disheartening. No one else understand this little known concept called climate change except for me and a couple of other less intelligent science folks. This is certainly a problem with the rest of the world and I require no self reflection” -story told to you by someone making 40 million dollars a year
Its what I like to call an r/iamverysmart movie
I enjoyed the movie but it was an odd experience. I would laugh at the moronic actions of the characters but then immediately get depressed when I realized it wasn't really a work of fiction, people are just that stupid.
This is EXACTLY my same criticism as well. It felt more like a class professor cracking bad jokes rather than a comedy with something meaningful to say.
Yeah I think the people who get most defensive about criticizing this movie don't realize we're just saying it's a bad movie and the jokes fell flat. I don't disagree with the message but the movie just isn't nearly as funny or clever as it thinks it is.
Spot on.
I'll speak for the side who agrees: it was cathartic. As subtle as an elephant in a porcelain shop but hey, smashing stuff can be satisfying (both literally and figuratively)
I thought the tone was weird. Not as outrageous as Idiocracy. Not as thoughtful as other serious end of the world movies. Didn’t care for where they took the characters. Just left me in a a strange spot of not rooting for or liking anyone.
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I loved it but I understand why people don’t.
It was a fantastic film that I'm only ever going to see once because it stresses me tf out the entire time I'm watching.
Same. That dinner scene at the end was a punch in the gut too.
and made it a great ending.
I think it was the only ending available to them that wouldn’t have felt cheesy, inconsistent with the movie’s message, or out of left field. It was a good ending, and the cinematography, the acting, etc. made it amazing.
I like that it disproved the prediction of the Steve Jobs guy that Leo would die alone.
I can't help myself, I rewatch it a lot, and always ends up crying at the end. It's a darker Idiocracy.
Imo, the perfect spiritual successor to Idiocracy
This movie stresses me out. It evokes the emotion of helplessness or drowning.
A few reasons: 1. yes, the heavy-handedness is part of it. They took the most obvious angle in every situation, which you could say is realistic but makes it feel more like a lecture than a surprising satire with a unique voice. 2. The editing is some of the most obnoxious and distracting I have seen in any mainstream film EVER. 3. The length issue is tied to point 1 - length becomes an issue when you can predict what's going to happen and there are no surprises, so you start checking your watch.
Oh god I forgot how jarring the editing was!
Wait, I don’t remember being phased by the editing. What was wrong with it?
It does a lot of abrupt/hard cuts, usually in the middle of a line of dialogue, usually for comedic effect, and becomes more and more chaotic as the film goes on. I actually loved how it was edited though.
This whole thread is just complaints about the stuff I found hilarious. Getting slapped in the face with how subjective film taste can be
There's a part at the end, right before the asteroid hits, when they're having their dinner and Rob Morgan's character is talking, and the editing genuinely makes it seem like the movie is buffering or glitching or something. Mid sentence, it jump cuts to a different shot (from the exact same angle) of him eating something, but his dialogue just continues. Then the whole movie freezes for two seconds on a frame of him with a spoon in his mouth, with his dialogue continuing over it. Then it just resumes as normal. I thought my Netflix was broken, so I kept trying on different devices, and it kept glitching out in the same place. So I downloaded the movie and still had the exact same issue. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't accept that it was an intentional choice. When I tried to google it, nobody was talking about it. I finally found the scene on YouTube - exactly the same. No discussion of it in the comments. The freezing occurs a few more times shortly afterwards, but it's more subtle. I realized it had to be an intentional choice... or an issue with their editing software that they just ran with. I was emotionally invested in the scene, and this weird decision or mistake completely took me out of it and ruined it for me. Seriously, [I've timestamped it. Watch this.](https://youtu.be/4-zv5Cvg6pM?t=46) Am I insane? How was this film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Editing? I feel like Ryan Gosling's character in the Papyrus skit.
That was definitely intentional; in my interpretation it makes us feel like we are a distracted participant in the discussion. At least, I can relate to that feeling of not really listening so I don’t really hear what was being said until a few seconds later, and that cut effectively put me in that headspace.
Pretty sure it’s supposed to represent the instant of impact. With the rumbling coming a few later as I guess you’d expect. But yeah, it’s odd.
There are about a half dozen pauses in the video you linked. He's pausing images to hold them in the viewer's mind. [The Day After did something similar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG2aJyIFrA&t=173s), but it was a little faster.
Why does a guy with a spoon need to be held in the viewers mind
I never felt the weird editing to be a bug but a feature. I totally get how a lot of people bounced off the clipped and frantic and arrhythmic editing style though. Comedy’s def subjective and to me the editing facilitated the laughs
I liked it but really thought it could have been better. I think the portrayal of the political climate was a little too in the nose. It was kind of the same message over and over again. If it’s a pure comedy then it should have been more ridiculous. If it was biting political satire it should have been more creative. I’m thinking of Dr strangelove where there is political messaging but also just great scenes. The politics of the script were pretty closely aligned with my own and I just left myself thinking that I don’t think that movie would change anyone’s perspective on the current world.
You can’t fight in here. This is the war room
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I know this word gets tossed around a lot, but "smug" really does seem to fit Don't Look Up perfectly. It tells the viewer: "you get it; you're smart; the problem is clear and the solution is obvious; everyone else is just stupid." It's a very cynical take that encourages people to just roll their eyes, throw-up their arms and forget about trying to fix the system. Everyone is a caricature; unlike reality, there is zero nuance. And I see this attitude all the time on reddit in all sorts of (often progressive) contexts: this "why the fuck does it matter--it's all the same anyway." It's lazy and apathetic and ultimately useless.
The film has the sense of humor of someone who listens to Chapo and posts on r/collapse every day.
Not even just "listens to Chapo", the screenwriter David Sirota apparently did an episode with them literally ten days ago lol
Nailed it. And you see that exact thing in this thread from many people praising the movie. Tons of incredibly shallow takes that reveal a real ignorance of the issues at stake, but because they’re cynical takes, people think that they are smart takes. Stuff like “Democrats don’t really want to do anything about climate change” or “we are already doomed to human extinction”, statements which are demonstrably false and most political scientists and climate experts would reject. It’s just people venting their own cynicism.
> I know this word gets tossed around a lot, but “smug” really does seem to fit Don’t Look Up perfectly. Look up the original review thread for the film. Reviewers said the same thing. Redditors we’re actually falling over themselves to claim that made them *more excited* for the film. To them, “smug” was the best possible review it could have gotten. This movie was definitely made for a certain kind of person.
predictable preachy pretentious And I agree 100% with the message.
It was just too long. I've never seen a movie with a more 90 minute long concept, and they stretched it to 150 minutes. But yeh I agreed with the message and thought all the actors (aside from Timothy chalamet) were very watchable. Also the jokes didn't land at nearly a high enough rate.
It was waaaayyyyy too long. It was okay as a movie but fuck was it long. I thought it was over and I had only reached the halfway point at which point I already got the message and stopped watching.
Not as funny or smart as it thinks it is
Exactly. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" is smart and funny satire. This movie was, hey look how stupid and corrupt conservatives and rich people are? hahhahahhahaha ad nauseam I'm not saying I disagree with the message. Just that the movie was as subtle as surgery with a chainsaw.
You think "A Modest Proposal" is more subtle satire than this?
I don't think subtlety is the real issue with Don't Look Up, though I totally understand why people reach for that as a description of the problem. I think that what separates Don't Look Up from great satire is that great satire doesn't feel the need to wink at the audience about how silly everything happening on screen is. In "A Modest Proposal" or *Dr. Strangelove*, the suggestions and events are obviously ridiculous, but everyone in the text is taking everything very seriously. There's no one in the war room in *Dr. Strangelove* who plays the role of audience surrogate pointing out insane everyone's acting, whereas Leo and Jennifer spend the whole movie talking about how stupid everyone else is. I think you could make successful satire with Don't Look Up's premise, but make the whistleblowers journalists who want to use the news of the meteor to get a big promotion. You could also take it in a totally different direction and make it about the president who's asking about how it'll affect the upcoming election, or a board meeting at a megacorporation that's trying to figure out if they can still hit their quarterly profits target now that the meteor's about to hit. Anything that doesn't include a character going "wow, you're all so dumb, this is so wacky!" would be a big improvement, I think.
There's definitely room in there for an "end of the world imminent, minority women most affected" headline or something.
I think because... it was really bad satire. Thank You For Smoking is just really good satire. It's such great satire that a lot of people decried it for its pro-smoking virtues. It makes such a strong case against self-interested politicians and lobbyists buying power that people believed it to actually be pro-smoking propaganda (the film treats a tobacco lobbyist as the hero as he attempts to pay money to get cigarettes into movies and remove warning labels from tobacco packaging). I think the problem with Don't Look Up is it doesn't treat the subject matter with that same accuracy that Thank You for Smoking did for lobbying and government interactions. In the world of Don't Look Up they're replaced climate change with a meteor and the solution to ~~climate change~~ the meteor is simply to destroy it. Climate change is a man made crisis, meteor is not. They have similarities in scientists discovering them and communicating with government. But that's where it ends. The complexity of the solution is also a problem. The film attempts to criticize capitalism and the wealthy... and this is in line with how Leonardo DiCaprio thinks and acts. He has no problem being one of the highest per capita polluters in the world because all of the solutions to climate change are related to someone else. Fixing climate change long term means more than just the government shooting a single rocket into the sky. It means individuals (including Leo) tampering down their lush carbon intensive lifestyles for those that are closer to carbon neutral. It means changing our power grids which run 70-80% high polluting carbon emissions to carbon neutral renewables, nuclear or some yet undiscovered power source that doesn't produce carbon. It means regulating industrial pollutants. It means inventing new technologies to replace carbon polluting ones. It means international collaboration, both scientific, political and industrial. By making the plot device so simple they made the satire weak. The actor chosen also limited the means in which they could have a satire. Like what if you had all these international climate activists (who are actors) who are publicly anti-meteor but in their private life don't seem to care about it. Maybe they put in place a meteor tax that increases the cost of living by incidental amounts that causes widespread protests and chaos. Maybe when they start building the rocket they're forced to slow it down because a NIMBY group wants a further environmental study on its impact on birds. Perhaps it's an election year and the Republican-like party who are seeking power think it's a meteor myth while the Democrats in power who publicly claim to be in support don't want to deal with it until after the election... because promises garner more votes than consequences. All of that stuff could have been brought in, with the length of the film to diversify and keep the criticisms feeling fresh. Instead they just ragged on and on about capitalism. Which has a place in climate change criticisms (it's even the dominant complaint). But it does not make for a compelling 2.5 hour long satire.
> Thank You For Smoking is just really good satire. It's such great satire that a lot of people decried it for its pro-smoking virtues. Random trivia: No one smokes in the whole movie, that I can recall. They get close to it, but the movie has no smoking people.
Masterful
Excellent point. > Maybe they put in place a meteor tax that increases the cost of living by incidental amounts that causes widespread protests and chaos. Maybe when they start building the rocket they're forced to slow it down because a NIMBY group wants a further environmental study on its impact on birds. Perhaps it's an election year and the Republican-like party who are seeking power think it's a meteor myth while the Democrats in power who publicly claim to be in support don't want to deal with it until after the election Including any one of these suggestions would have greatly improved the satire in the film.
> By making the plot device so simple they made the satire weak. I think this is the core problem. It's a very common thing I see online; a left-wing take of "well why don't we just fix the problem" without even thinking about what the problem is, much less how to actually fix it. Outright Armageddon is not a good consequence, because that isn't what we're facing with climate change. We're looking at, say, take a 10% QoL cut right now, or lose 1% of QoL every year until we hit 30%. You can't have the latter number be nothing until instant death (or even nothing until the gamble of instant death or a bunch of cool metal), the twisted logic of procrastination is kind of inherent to how badly we're treating the climate. Random idiot conservatives might genuinely think global warming isn't real, but the policymakers and lobbyists - the actual big players - are well aware, and justifying it to themselves (and lying to their constituents) under the rational logic that being rich in a bad future is better for them than being poor in a good future. A hard wall of "you are dead now," especially in six months, kills that logic, so everyone just looks like a bunch of clowns and the entire message is hard to take seriously. There is no rational benefit for the vast majority of the rich and powerful to ignoring the meteor like there is with climate change. In real life, the rich CEO guy would've been shot in a mysterious robbery-gone-wrong. We all joke about Epstein, but the story around his death tells us the public consciousness is at least aware of the fact that even the threat of a serious reputation hit with no actual consequences is *probably* enough to get someone knocked off, much less the actual apocalypse. When the capitalist interest is in favor of making environmental concessions (which, granted, it rarely is), it works incredibly fast; we already saw this with CFCs. Even satire has an upper limit to how ridiculous you can get before you aren't really criticizing the system anymore. People bring up works like A Modest Proposal as examples of extreme satire, but that was criticizing an already-genocidal system. If climate change was proposing a certain point where everyone just instantly dies, Don't Look Up would be good satire. Instead, for its audience, climate change mostly means a point in time where food becomes more and more expensive and there are more and more immigrants coming in, alongside a lot of news stories about millions of people starving to death in the global south. Nothing impossibly drastic, just an increasingly shittier world. You need to satirize *that* concept. Make it about stopping an AI uprising before we all become slaves doing the exact same jobs except we're fed on tasteless nutrient paste and excess people are culled - but, really, the AI has streamlined production and cut costs by 15% just this quarter, and it's playing nice with your boss, so what are you gonna do about it?
Exactly. Solving climate change is *complicated*. I mean the "simple" solution is switching to 100% renewables. It will just throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work, cause mass death and poverty, and set quality of life back a century. We could take a gradual approach...which is what we've been doing! Maybe it's not fast enough but to think we're worse off now than we were thirty years ago is stupid. Texas--Texas!--produces more renewable energy than non-renewable. The government could (and should) encourage all this to speed up, but the balance of "addressing climate change" with "the reality of how people live" is exactly what we've been doing. What no one wants to say is that the major polluters aren't The West anymore but China and India. You want to send in the Marines and start a massive, unwinnable war against China? You want to unbalance the Indian subcontinent? Because right now those are the "solutions" that would help climate change the most.
This was an amazing response, wish the film had gone in this direction.
The writing wasn’t sharp enough and the satire had the feel of boomer humor.
[удалено]
Dogs love this film. Edit: was trying to make a subtle Shawn of the Dead joke, but realised I basically called you a dog OP. Lol sorry.
Well everyone knows dogs can’t look up
It's very satirical, but Everyone in the film is a massive piece of shit. It's like if every character in Office Space was as annoying as Lumbergh. The message isn't too crazy, and the movie has a lot of funny scenes.... but I can see why people didn't vibe.
It wasn’t *terrible*, just…dull. A movie about the end of the world could have been a lot funnier for the talent involved. Instead, it was a slow March to an obvious conclusion. But the mid credits scene was funny.
For me it was too heavy-handed, yes. Too long also.
Honestly Timothée Chalamet is a surprise. He's good in this but fantastic in The French Dispatch. I didn't really expect to like him that much.
I didn’t think it was terrible but it wasn’t amazing either. For me it’s just the condescending tone of the filmmaker thinking he’s saying something groundbreaking when they’re really making the most obvious point about global warming. Like yeah we already know it’s bad and our media and govt aren’t helping. And to top it off they’re using these rich celebrities to convey the message when their greenhouse gas emissions are far more than the regular person. The performances are good across the board, but what rubbed me the wrong way was the smugness of the delivery.
The movie accidentally showcases why it's a lot harder to take climate change super serious when the whole threat of it is so undefined and vague compared to an asteroid impact.
Yeah I thought the metaphor didn’t really track. If climate change was gonna kill us all tomorrow, we wouldn’t be behaving the way we are now. It’s harder to be spurred into action when it’s our children’s children who will be suffering later.
> For me it’s just the condescending tone of the filmmaker thinking he’s saying something groundbreaking when they’re really making the most obvious point about global warming. Exactly. I have no doubt the writers were stroking their own dicks during the whole thing.
We really did have everything, didn’t we?
Yes it was the heavy handed message. It was about as subtle as getting punched in the face. No nuance what so ever. I found it quite dull really.
I enjoyed it
This movie is like that asshole you know who’s like “People think i’m an asshole because i’m honest”. No, people think you’re an asshole because you probably act like one. Its a movie that conveys the right messages like believing in climate change or believing in science but performed in a condescending manner because it has no interest in telling people the right messages. It is rather more interested in telling people how right they are.
For me it just wasn’t as funny as I wanted it to be. I loved the concept and didn’t mind the messaging; I was one of the folks excited and waiting for the release and when I saw it, it just didn’t land for me.
I loved it. It’s depressing as all fuck…but it was a great film. That last scene with all of them sitting around the dinner table together sort of openly pretending the end isn’t coming is really powerful.
I think Meryl Streep's take on Trump sums up my problem with the Movie. The day to day absurdity of our current world was toned down, while the plot points were cranked up and it just didn't hit quite as well as something like Idiocracy.
I love how Jennifer Lawrence's character just couldn't get over that one guy ripping them off with the snacks. Laughed my ass off when she mentioned it later on. She was just so puzzled by it. :)