Some astronomers have raised the alarm about our unpreparedness to deal with the existential threat of an eventual comet collision with Earth of the kind that killed the dinosaurs. And while this is a real threat that an advanced culture would be able to allocate the resources to prepare themselves for, the sad reality is that we can't even muster the will to deal with the two major SELF-IMPOSED existential threats - global warming and nuclear war - now both more dire than ever, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and others. This movie hilariously (and I think quite accurately) depicts how we might respond to the news that a comet was definitely on course to end life on Earth in six months time, that is: in about the same way we're dealing with those other urgent threats to our existence right now...
We have a corrupt political class and corporate media manufacturing a culture of intense partisan division, or else of medicated apathy and social media distraction. We lionize the same profit-motivated billionaires who condone coups of foreign governments to steal their lithium and other resources, and we seem to be relying on these billionaires to be the ones to solve all our problems for us. In summary, without serious grass-roots reform, capitalism has doomed us all. And the comet is a brilliant device to highlight these problems. By making the existential threat that much more concrete and objective to where we can literally calculate the exact date and time we are all going to die, it highlights the absurdity of our inaction and our reliance on inept and illegitimate authorities.
"Don't Look Up" is a perfect satire of the times we are living in. In fact it is on a par with "Okja", one of my favourite movies of recent years. While Okja is a satire of the food industry more specifically, and Don't Look Up is more broadly about the topics I mentioned, both films are wild roller coaster rides, juggling drama with dark comedy and ridiculous over-the-top characters. They are fantasy films one crazy step removed from our real world, but otherwise so refreshingly blunt and honest about our real world. The scripts are frankly anti-corporate in a way that you usually wouldn't expect to emerge from a big-budget Hollywood production unscathed. And yet, the end products are as incisive as they are entertaining. I have to commend Netflix for producing both of these films. "Don't Look Up" captures the zeitgeist of our current era better than any film I can think of.
We have a corrupt political class and corporate media manufacturing a culture of intense partisan division, or else of medicated apathy and social media distraction. We lionize the same profit-motivated billionaires who condone coups of foreign governments to steal their lithium and other resources, and we seem to be relying on these billionaires to be the ones to solve all our problems for us. In summary, without serious grass-roots reform, capitalism has doomed us all. And the comet is a brilliant device to highlight these problems. By making the existential threat that much more concrete and objective to where we can literally calculate the exact date and time we are all going to die, it highlights the absurdity of our inaction and our reliance on inept and illegitimate authorities.
"Don't Look Up" is a perfect satire of the times we are living in. In fact it is on a par with "Okja", one of my favourite movies of recent years. While Okja is a satire of the food industry more specifically, and Don't Look Up is more broadly about the topics I mentioned, both films are wild roller coaster rides, juggling drama with dark comedy and ridiculous over-the-top characters. They are fantasy films one crazy step removed from our real world, but otherwise so refreshingly blunt and honest about our real world. The scripts are frankly anti-corporate in a way that you usually wouldn't expect to emerge from a big-budget Hollywood production unscathed. And yet, the end products are as incisive as they are entertaining. I have to commend Netflix for producing both of these films. "Don't Look Up" captures the zeitgeist of our current era better than any film I can think of.