“Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s dark comedy released on Netflix just before Christmas, has gotten an enormous amount of attention, despite the fact most film critics tend to agree it doesn’t hold together too well artistically, even as some welcome it for its propagandistic value.
As you’d expect from the creator of “Step Brothers” and “Talladega Nights,” nothing about the film is subtle. A giant comet is barreling toward Earth, and both the media and Washington are incapable of taking the threat seriously.
McKay and the story co-creator, David Sirota, have been very clear about what they’re up to. “Clearly,” McKay tells GQ, the movie is an “analogy or an allegory for the climate crisis.”
After the Netflix release, McKay took to Twitter:
“Loving all the heated debate about our movie. But if you don’t have at least a small ember of anxiety about the climate collapsing (or the US teetering) I’m not sure Don’t Look Up makes any sense. It’s like a robot viewing a love story. ‘WHy ArE thEir FacEs so cLoSe ToGether?’”
That tweet is probably funnier than any line in the movie. But it’s also ironic, given that the reason the film fails as political satire is that McKay is more like that robot than he realizes.
There are three flaws to this allegory. He gets the media, politics, and the effect of climate change wrong.
McKay told NPR that he joined with Sirota to write the movie because:
“We’re both incredibly frustrated with the lack of coverage of the climate crisis. You know, it’s usually the fourth or fifth story. It’s never the right tone, which should be much more urgent.”
Really? Where do these guys get their news? Many news outlets have full-time reporters dedicated to climate change.
Just last year ABC News and CNN created full-time climate-change news teams. The Washington Post and the New York Times were already there.
In April, Time magazine ran another of many cover stories on climate change showing a burning map of the world under the headline, “Climate Is Everything.” In 1989, Time skipped Person of the Year and made “Endangered Earth” the “Planet of the Year.”
In McKay’s movie, what is supposed to be the New York Times drops its coverage of the planet-killing comet story when it fails to get good Web traffic. Do I really need to be the one to defend the New York Times from this idiotic insinuation?
Like a robot watching the news, McKay watches the near-daily coverage of climate change and says, “wHeRE IS tHE cLImATE HySTeria!?!”
Then there’s politics. Meryl Streep’s entertaining take on a female President Trump scores some points, but Trump isn’t president. Joe Biden is, and he calls climate change an “existential threat” all the time.
And he’s not alone. Sirota wrote speeches for Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2020, and his old boss routinely said that kind of thing, too — as did virtually all the Democratic presidential nominees.
And it’s not just rhetoric; we’re spending vast sums of money and reorganizing the missions of many government agencies to deal with the existential threat of climate change.
But here’s the funny thing: Climate change is not an “existential threat” like a planet-killing comet, which let’s just admit would make for great TV.
Not even according to the United Nations IPCC, whose worst-case scenarios for climate change, as terrible as some are, manifest themselves over a century and would not end all life here.
McKay & Co. are free to disagree about the aptness of their analogy. In the movie, the only way to stop the comet is to push it off course by aiming nuclear weapons at it.
Some argue that in real life, the only way to reduce carbon emissions is to use nuclear power. Sanders and many of his Democratic colleagues oppose that — which is odd if you actually believe we have no time to waste to save the planet.
Read rest at NY Post
If it’s got numbnuts leonardo in it, it’s a good bet that is offers climate nonsense.
Let’s look at the real science for a change. Science isn’t science anymore. It’s worse than it’s ever been before say, 1400’s. Today I’m surprised they permit us to say the sun is the center of our solar system. I stand with scientists that tell the truth like Dr, Susan (Polar bears) Crockfod of UVis who got fired for her research showing Polar Bears are thriving. I’m an biology grad alumnus. Dr. Essterbrooke is the top climate scientist and he has proof of the fraud. My website page tells it all. http://uralica.com/finland.html
If this film was supposed to be a Climate Change allegory, its entertainment value could have been enhanced by having Greta eaten by a raptor on the new planet …
Fodder for a new campaign … “Climate Change doesn’t kill, but carnivorous birds do!”
Is it going to be s bad as Kevin Kosners big flop Water World(Sounds like the name for a water park) or some other Eco-Freak message like Down Sizing Ferngully or what else the Hollywood lose nuts come up with
I might watch the movie twenty years from now, for free.