Originally posted by aldra
looks like 2 hours of stunting on 'science deniers' filmed from the perspective of a very high horse
Don’t Look Up appears to depict a world that cannot come together to solve a crisis, where science becomes politicized, where celebrity culture is more important than matters of life and death. It seems to show us a very negative view of ourselves, as a people who simply cannot cannot get our act together even when it is most necessary.
Or does it? I say that Don’t Look Up only appears to depict us this way because I think the film is more subtle than it looks at first, and that negative reviewers have missed some of the most critical parts of the point it is trying to make.
The complaint of these reviewers is that Don’t Look Up makes points that are obvious and easy, that its argument is that “we” are all too distracted by our cell phones and celebrity culture to care about the end of the world. It is a nihilistic film about nincompoops. And it does it all without enough subtlety.
I think there is a good argument to be made that there is nothing wrong with being “shrill” or “unsubtle” when trying to make an important political point, and some of these reviewers remind me of those who criticized Bernie Sanders for being too aggressively angry that people in this country don’t have healthcare. Is this really a normative judgment about a film’s quality or is it just a reflection of reviewers’ temperaments and politics, where anything too angry or obvious seems the enemy of art, which is necessarily cerebral or inaccessible?
Don’t Look Up actually shows us an America that was perfectly prepared to come together to stop the comet, and where people are angry when they find out that their lives are being put at risk in order to protect the future profits of cell phone manufacturers. But they are distracted by a media that won’t do its job, and misled by demagogues who say that they should trust the “cool rich” more than “them.” At the end, however, those who perish are able to take some solace from the fact that they did everything they could. They do not die screaming in terror, nor have they lost faith in each other.
It is a similar moral to Albert Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus”: the near-certainty of failure should not lead to resignation, but to even more determination. To end your life contentedly and without regrets, you need to know that you tried, regardless of the outcome. This is not a film that is telling Americans they will die because of how much they suck. Instead, it says that we could solve our problems. It does depict a successful plan for stopping the comet that nearly works. But that plan is derailed by those who would gladly gamble with other people’s lives if it meant they themselves might get richer. The question it asks us is: will we stop these people? It is an exhortation and a warning, not a work of misanthropy or nihilism.
