If anything they beat the drum too much, I didn’t see “Don’t Look Up”, because of Trump Fatigue. Like so much media from 2015-2020 that got made had one note, and that note was “Orange Man Bad”, and I’m like “I know, I couldn’t be more aware that orange man bad. I did everything I could to stop it, but Americans are idiots.”
It’s like… I get it everything is fucked. You can stop blasting the despair in my face any second now.
Like I’m actually glad Hazbin Hotel got delayed for so long, because I just know Adam was basically just “Donald Trump with a harp and a halo” in an earlier draft, there’s no way in literal Hell he wasn’t.
Also the inciting incident to the 'verse of Firefly:
Mal: "Here’s how it is: (The) Earth got used up, so we (moved out, and) terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths, some rich and flush with new technologies, some not so much. (The) Central Planets, them as formed the Alliance, waged war to bring everyone under their rule; a few idiots tried to fight it, among them myself. I’m Malcolm Reynolds, captain of Serenity.
It’s not a fictional disease. They stopped crop rotations as the soil became too fucked up so everyone is using the same GMO corn but because they are identical they are susceptible to the same disease and it can spread rapidly.
This has happened to lots of crops like bananas and is currently happening again.
The beginning of the movie is people trying to just play their baseball game around a sandstorm getting annoyed at scientists for telling them the world is ending to the point where NASA is in hiding.
Not fictional. Likely reality without the, us getting lucky enough to shoot McConaughey through a wormhole bit.
I just mean that I don’t remember if climate change was specifically called out. I don’t think it was. Not that another ecological disaster wasn’t a major plot point.
Ahh man it’s been on the rewatch list for some time and like there is like 20 different disasters happening on earth in that movie. I don’t know if they specifically call it out but I mean wildfires, blights, and shutdown of governments… It feels like the reason they don’t call it out is why bother at that point.
But you might be right that they just call out symptoms and leave it at that. It’s shockingly anti science while on earth.
Pretty much, the problem is Hollywood can only choose between “Make a good movie” or “Have a good message”, when “Make an entertaining movie that deliver the message without being overly preachy” was always an option, gaming does it all the time. (Which is probably why Video Game Movies are such big money makers now)
PS: Waterworld is sadly the best movie you’ve listed here, TDAT is the second best.
One of the reasons I love Spec Ops: The Line. It’s marketed to the correct crowd. The exact type of person that needs to understand killing your way through a situation rarely works is the one who will see the cover and think “Aw cool, a shooting game about killing your way through an adventure”.
I like the idea of Spec Ops, but the game getting judgemental and preachy about how evil I am when it literally isn’t giving me any alternative is a big turn off.
In earlier builds there was actually an option to do the right thing and stop this madness, and it would just roll credits. That was actually brilliant, but too many beta testers kept doing exactly that and wondering if the game was that short, if it was joke, or if they were missing something… So they removed the option
A shame, because if the game has me on rails, then it’s not my fault that terrible shit happens. It’s the person who designed the course this way.
It’s why I find Undertale to be a better anti-violence message.
Never heard that about early builds, which makes me think it’s perhaps not verified.
I took it as the railroading matching up with Walker’s feelings of having only one choice. It doesn’t make sense to continue, but you feel forced to anyway - very much like him. What makes it more convincing, to me, is that there are hundreds of other action games that don’t give you a non-action, non-killing choice - and no one has those same criticisms of those games.
I respect Undertale, I guess I never felt much admiration for its peaceful methods because it’s such a direct translation of their combat mechanics, when making peace with people is rarely so simple.
I actually really liked the premise behind that one, the idea that collectively since we flooded our entertainment with cynical grimdark media, we all just accepted that ill use of technology leading to an apocalypse was an inevitability, and apathy let it happen.
It was an interesting message that I would’ve liked to see in a different vehicle.
Pretty much, see the endless amount of idiots who unironically see themselves as the antagonist and think it’s a good thing.
(Trump’s kids unfavorably comparing the Left to the Resistance in the newer Star Wars films which very blatantly had the First Order be a stand-in for America’s Alt Right and Kylo Ren a warning about toxic masculinity, now that’s something I’ll never forget)
the message went completely over the heads of the people it needed to reach
You had a series of very cynical and deliberately manipulative media coverage of the film which tried to spin it as anything but a climate change movie. And then you had a bunch of “man on the street” pieces intended to make viewers appear stupid.
But the core theory of media influenced economic change is rooted in the idea that a movie can shift people from their profit motives. No oil executive is going to watch a slapstick comedy and decide to shift his business’s core financial model because of a few jokes. No bank executives are going to divest from carbon emitting industries because some Hollywood starlets made fun of them. No senior member of political leadership is going to change how mining permits and environmental regulations are written because Adam McKay posted big numbers at the box office.
The Network didn’t change how Americans consumed their news media. Soylent Green didn’t cause Americans to reconsider our policies on factory farming. Jarhead didn’t cause any military personal to exit Iraq or Afghanistan. The only movie that seems to have really moved the dial on public policy is Idiocracy, the inspiration behind Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s quest to get more IT people to fuck.
The only movie that seems to have really moved the dial on public policy is Idiocracy, the inspiration behind Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s quest to get more IT people to fuck.
And even then I have to remind people that saying “Idiocracy is a documentary!” that they’re being too optimistic.
We are NOT in a fully-automated sex-positive polygamous future with leadership that acknowledges society’s problems and places its best and brightest towards a solution, one where free speech is so alive you can even name your restaurant “Buttfuckers” and no one’s even slightly offended, one where even the least educated people in our society can get good quality high-paying jobs in everything from the arts to medical, one where sex work is no longer demonized and is considered so valid a profession that you can get your ass rimmed at Starbucks while waiting for your coffee.
And I don’t understand why people think we have it anywhere near that good.
We are NOT in a fully-automated sex-positive polygamous future with leadership that acknowledges society’s problems and places its best and brightest towards a solution
In fairness, neither were they. A bunch of the “automated” aspects of society were simply systems nobody knew how to operate that were left on autopilot. The administrators rose through the ranks by being Yes-Men and insisting broken systems were operating as intended. Spraying your crops with gatorade is only an “automation” in the most literal sense. It isn’t how a “fully-automated” society is intended to operate.
Further, the whole jail system plus subsequent courtroom drama illustrated the dogmatic resistance to change and zero-tolerance for risks inherent in any change, resulting in a highly sclerotic society. It was only able to change when faced with a sudden catastrophic food crisis.
one where free speech is so alive you can even name your restaurant “Buttfuckers” and no one’s even slightly offended, one where even the least educated people in our society can get good quality high-paying jobs in everything from the arts to medical, one where sex work is no longer demonized and is considered so valid a profession that you can get your ass rimmed at Starbucks while waiting for your coffee.
Hyper-commoditization and exploitation of labor isn’t liberation, its slavery. What you’re describing is a cultural shift, not a relaxation of bigotry (which - again, referencing the courtroom scene - was in full abundance) or absence of elitism (characters regularly derided one another’s intelligence while deferring to the violence of authority figures) or a flattening of incomes (the intro scenes of the future were full of poverty, kept in check by a murderous police force).
And I don’t understand why people think we have it anywhere near that good.
The show was a cartoonish reflection of modern day. It wasn’t intended to suggest we have it better or worse, but to parody how things were in the present.
Even the depiction of the present illustrated huge social failures - institutional corruption, political inertia, misappropriation of resources, the false choice between careerism and hedonism - that metastasized over the intervening era into comically exaggerated state.
But people fixate on the first five minutes. And they really fixate on the idea of eugenics implicit in those first five minutes. This is precisely because the same set of smug, elitist, know-nothing oligarchs reflected in the movie are consuming it and taking away the most backwards and regressive messages.
There was definitely commentary on the media in the movie, and society at large, and corporations, and politicians. But the core message of the movie was not just their willingness to let disaster happen in exchange for wealth and power, but also their willingness to lie and manipulate the population for their own selfish gain.
The people it needs to reach are world leaders, and that’s just not going to happen. World leaders aren’t blind to the problem, they’re just fine with burning the earth for money.
Ellen DeGeneres saw Trump watching Finding Dory and tried to explain that the movie was about how it was wrong to separate families.
Trump loved it and had a viewing party at the White House.
ICE illegally separated families at the border, kicked parents back to Mexico, and adopted the kids into white families… And those were the lucky ones, the unlucky ones died in a concentration camp composed solely of children where the teenagers were expected to take care of the kids who were in turn expected to take care of the toddlers.
Trump and his wife Melania showed up with the latter literally wearing a shirt that read “I don’t really care, do you?”
You cannot appeal to the conscience of someone who doesn’t have one, no matter how good your movie is or what it’s about.
I tried to watch that movie. But I quit it 15 minutes in.
What was even the point? It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t enjoyable, it wasn’t dramatic.
It’s like “look, here is a blatantly obvious metaphor on climate change” that’s our whole movie.
It seemed aimed for a very particular subset of people that wanted to feel a pat on the head or something. I feel like it’s the same people who enjoy that big ass climate change doom clock.
Just too much virtue signalling for my taste. Without actually making anything useful.
I disagree. The point of the movie is not to make people feel to feel smug, it is to provide catharsis for people who feel like the entire world is insane while simultaneously telling them that they are the insane one.
I think that’s a euphemism for “a pat in the head”.
As I said, I think is a movie aimed to a very specific subset of people, of which I don’t belong. The set of people that also enjoy that doomsday climate clock that I keep bringing out because I think it gives away the same kind of emotions to people who liked that movie.
And for people that does not feel rewarded just for a movie, or a clock or whatever, saying to you “good for worrying”, the movie becomes nothing, it’s empty of anything else. It’s a very simple 75 million dollar message that says “feel better than others, feel special for worrying”.
Also the whole message becomes a little ridiculous, when it’s delivered on the biggest media platform, with millions in budget, a bunch of famous actors acting on it, and then praised by millions of people.
To me it feels like those conservative figures that say that they are being cancelled while they are live on national TV. It’s just silly. And this movie gives the same vibes to me. Talking about the big ignored problem to an audience of millions of people that purposely went there to see the movie about the big ignored problem.
That is an extremely condescending way of saying that you did not personally find the movie to be funny.
Different people can have different senses of humor. There are lots of comedies that I absolutely cannot stand; that does not make me right and the people who enjoy them wrong.
It’s a movie, it doesn’t need to be “useful”. Some people were entertained, some people were emotionally affected. It was successful art. And we’re still talking about it.
I’m just giving my opinion on why that movie is bad.
I know that probably in the States now even liking or not liking a movie is a political statement, and that some people “like it” just because they have to. But it’s a bad movie. I’ve watch a lot of crap, and most times I power through it to at least see the ending. Imagine how bad had to be that I thought that it wasn’t even worth to try to see the whole thing.
I really like the first half of the movie. That feeling of outrage as they try to get attention is just so well done. But the second half just gets too painful. I can’t watch it
I mean they did.
Don’t Look Up was huge. It had an all-star, ensemble cast and was one of the biggest releases of 2021.
How many times do you expect them to best the drum?
If anything they beat the drum too much, I didn’t see “Don’t Look Up”, because of Trump Fatigue. Like so much media from 2015-2020 that got made had one note, and that note was “Orange Man Bad”, and I’m like “I know, I couldn’t be more aware that orange man bad. I did everything I could to stop it, but Americans are idiots.”
It’s like… I get it everything is fucked. You can stop blasting the despair in my face any second now.
Like I’m actually glad Hazbin Hotel got delayed for so long, because I just know Adam was basically just “Donald Trump with a harp and a halo” in an earlier draft, there’s no way in literal Hell he wasn’t.
Learned a new term the other day, The Doomscroll Industrial Complex
Joan is a great writer! I’m glad to see a fellow lemming linking her work here.
Solid read. Thanks
Ya know I was watching a Why Files episode on Reptilians who farm negative emotions from humans by keeping us in a cycle of reincarnation.
That makes, too much sense when shit like the DIC you’re talking about exists.
The Day After Tomorrow had a dude that was basically a stand-in for Dick Cheney so Dennis Quaid could tell him that he should have done more sooner.
Waterworld, earth covered in water after the ice caps melted.
Geostorm took for granted that we needed a global network of satellites to battle climate change.
And who can forget The Happening or Birdemic?
Oh, you wanted good movies? (tho I lowkey love Geostorm)
The room next door is an “assisted cancer suicide” personal movie, but has as punchline that US empire climate terrorism justifies suicide.
Don’t forget wall-e
Many people forget that the reason everybody is trying to find a new planet in interstellar, is because climate change made theirs unhabitable.
Also the inciting incident to the 'verse of Firefly:
Was it explicitly climate change? I thought it was “blight” or whatever fictional disease killing crops.
It’s not a fictional disease. They stopped crop rotations as the soil became too fucked up so everyone is using the same GMO corn but because they are identical they are susceptible to the same disease and it can spread rapidly.
This has happened to lots of crops like bananas and is currently happening again.
The beginning of the movie is people trying to just play their baseball game around a sandstorm getting annoyed at scientists for telling them the world is ending to the point where NASA is in hiding.
Not fictional. Likely reality without the, us getting lucky enough to shoot McConaughey through a wormhole bit.
I just mean that I don’t remember if climate change was specifically called out. I don’t think it was. Not that another ecological disaster wasn’t a major plot point.
Ahh man it’s been on the rewatch list for some time and like there is like 20 different disasters happening on earth in that movie. I don’t know if they specifically call it out but I mean wildfires, blights, and shutdown of governments… It feels like the reason they don’t call it out is why bother at that point.
But you might be right that they just call out symptoms and leave it at that. It’s shockingly anti science while on earth.
Not even a mention of Happy Feet. C’mon. Lol
This is a great though, and if anything, yeah, “pollution apocalypse” has become such a common trope at this point it’s almost lazy writing now.
Pretty much, the problem is Hollywood can only choose between “Make a good movie” or “Have a good message”, when “Make an entertaining movie that deliver the message without being overly preachy” was always an option, gaming does it all the time. (Which is probably why Video Game Movies are such big money makers now)
PS: Waterworld is sadly the best movie you’ve listed here, TDAT is the second best.
One of the reasons I love Spec Ops: The Line. It’s marketed to the correct crowd. The exact type of person that needs to understand killing your way through a situation rarely works is the one who will see the cover and think “Aw cool, a shooting game about killing your way through an adventure”.
I like the idea of Spec Ops, but the game getting judgemental and preachy about how evil I am when it literally isn’t giving me any alternative is a big turn off.
In earlier builds there was actually an option to do the right thing and stop this madness, and it would just roll credits. That was actually brilliant, but too many beta testers kept doing exactly that and wondering if the game was that short, if it was joke, or if they were missing something… So they removed the option
A shame, because if the game has me on rails, then it’s not my fault that terrible shit happens. It’s the person who designed the course this way.
It’s why I find Undertale to be a better anti-violence message.
Never heard that about early builds, which makes me think it’s perhaps not verified.
I took it as the railroading matching up with Walker’s feelings of having only one choice. It doesn’t make sense to continue, but you feel forced to anyway - very much like him. What makes it more convincing, to me, is that there are hundreds of other action games that don’t give you a non-action, non-killing choice - and no one has those same criticisms of those games.
I respect Undertale, I guess I never felt much admiration for its peaceful methods because it’s such a direct translation of their combat mechanics, when making peace with people is rarely so simple.
I thought Tomorrowland was good. Not great. But good enough.
I actually really liked the premise behind that one, the idea that collectively since we flooded our entertainment with cynical grimdark media, we all just accepted that ill use of technology leading to an apocalypse was an inevitability, and apathy let it happen.
It was an interesting message that I would’ve liked to see in a different vehicle.
Not to mention the entire series of “Scorcher” movies, starring the famous Tugg Speedman.
And the message went completely over the heads of the people it needed to reach.
Pretty much, see the endless amount of idiots who unironically see themselves as the antagonist and think it’s a good thing.
(Trump’s kids unfavorably comparing the Left to the Resistance in the newer Star Wars films which very blatantly had the First Order be a stand-in for America’s Alt Right and Kylo Ren a warning about toxic masculinity, now that’s something I’ll never forget)
You had a series of very cynical and deliberately manipulative media coverage of the film which tried to spin it as anything but a climate change movie. And then you had a bunch of “man on the street” pieces intended to make viewers appear stupid.
But the core theory of media influenced economic change is rooted in the idea that a movie can shift people from their profit motives. No oil executive is going to watch a slapstick comedy and decide to shift his business’s core financial model because of a few jokes. No bank executives are going to divest from carbon emitting industries because some Hollywood starlets made fun of them. No senior member of political leadership is going to change how mining permits and environmental regulations are written because Adam McKay posted big numbers at the box office.
The Network didn’t change how Americans consumed their news media. Soylent Green didn’t cause Americans to reconsider our policies on factory farming. Jarhead didn’t cause any military personal to exit Iraq or Afghanistan. The only movie that seems to have really moved the dial on public policy is Idiocracy, the inspiration behind Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s quest to get more IT people to fuck.
And even then I have to remind people that saying “Idiocracy is a documentary!” that they’re being too optimistic.
We are NOT in a fully-automated sex-positive polygamous future with leadership that acknowledges society’s problems and places its best and brightest towards a solution, one where free speech is so alive you can even name your restaurant “Buttfuckers” and no one’s even slightly offended, one where even the least educated people in our society can get good quality high-paying jobs in everything from the arts to medical, one where sex work is no longer demonized and is considered so valid a profession that you can get your ass rimmed at Starbucks while waiting for your coffee.
And I don’t understand why people think we have it anywhere near that good.
In fairness, neither were they. A bunch of the “automated” aspects of society were simply systems nobody knew how to operate that were left on autopilot. The administrators rose through the ranks by being Yes-Men and insisting broken systems were operating as intended. Spraying your crops with gatorade is only an “automation” in the most literal sense. It isn’t how a “fully-automated” society is intended to operate.
Further, the whole jail system plus subsequent courtroom drama illustrated the dogmatic resistance to change and zero-tolerance for risks inherent in any change, resulting in a highly sclerotic society. It was only able to change when faced with a sudden catastrophic food crisis.
Hyper-commoditization and exploitation of labor isn’t liberation, its slavery. What you’re describing is a cultural shift, not a relaxation of bigotry (which - again, referencing the courtroom scene - was in full abundance) or absence of elitism (characters regularly derided one another’s intelligence while deferring to the violence of authority figures) or a flattening of incomes (the intro scenes of the future were full of poverty, kept in check by a murderous police force).
The show was a cartoonish reflection of modern day. It wasn’t intended to suggest we have it better or worse, but to parody how things were in the present.
Even the depiction of the present illustrated huge social failures - institutional corruption, political inertia, misappropriation of resources, the false choice between careerism and hedonism - that metastasized over the intervening era into comically exaggerated state.
But people fixate on the first five minutes. And they really fixate on the idea of eugenics implicit in those first five minutes. This is precisely because the same set of smug, elitist, know-nothing oligarchs reflected in the movie are consuming it and taking away the most backwards and regressive messages.
We haven’t gotten dumb enough. The buttfuckers restaurants are still right around the corner.
Once AI lets us get too dumb to read we’ll be closer than ever.
My brother-in-law explicitly thought that the movie was commentary on “the liberal media.”
There was definitely commentary on the media in the movie, and society at large, and corporations, and politicians. But the core message of the movie was not just their willingness to let disaster happen in exchange for wealth and power, but also their willingness to lie and manipulate the population for their own selfish gain.
The people it needs to reach are world leaders, and that’s just not going to happen. World leaders aren’t blind to the problem, they’re just fine with burning the earth for money.
Ellen DeGeneres saw Trump watching Finding Dory and tried to explain that the movie was about how it was wrong to separate families.
Trump loved it and had a viewing party at the White House.
ICE illegally separated families at the border, kicked parents back to Mexico, and adopted the kids into white families… And those were the lucky ones, the unlucky ones died in a concentration camp composed solely of children where the teenagers were expected to take care of the kids who were in turn expected to take care of the toddlers.
Trump and his wife Melania showed up with the latter literally wearing a shirt that read “I don’t really care, do you?”
You cannot appeal to the conscience of someone who doesn’t have one, no matter how good your movie is or what it’s about.
I tried to watch that movie. But I quit it 15 minutes in.
What was even the point? It wasn’t funny, it wasn’t enjoyable, it wasn’t dramatic.
It’s like “look, here is a blatantly obvious metaphor on climate change” that’s our whole movie.
It seemed aimed for a very particular subset of people that wanted to feel a pat on the head or something. I feel like it’s the same people who enjoy that big ass climate change doom clock.
Just too much virtue signalling for my taste. Without actually making anything useful.
I disagree. The point of the movie is not to make people feel to feel smug, it is to provide catharsis for people who feel like the entire world is insane while simultaneously telling them that they are the insane one.
I think that’s a euphemism for “a pat in the head”. As I said, I think is a movie aimed to a very specific subset of people, of which I don’t belong. The set of people that also enjoy that doomsday climate clock that I keep bringing out because I think it gives away the same kind of emotions to people who liked that movie.
And for people that does not feel rewarded just for a movie, or a clock or whatever, saying to you “good for worrying”, the movie becomes nothing, it’s empty of anything else. It’s a very simple 75 million dollar message that says “feel better than others, feel special for worrying”. Also the whole message becomes a little ridiculous, when it’s delivered on the biggest media platform, with millions in budget, a bunch of famous actors acting on it, and then praised by millions of people.
To me it feels like those conservative figures that say that they are being cancelled while they are live on national TV. It’s just silly. And this movie gives the same vibes to me. Talking about the big ignored problem to an audience of millions of people that purposely went there to see the movie about the big ignored problem.
That is an extremely condescending way of saying that you did not personally find the movie to be funny.
Different people can have different senses of humor. There are lots of comedies that I absolutely cannot stand; that does not make me right and the people who enjoy them wrong.
It’s a movie, it doesn’t need to be “useful”. Some people were entertained, some people were emotionally affected. It was successful art. And we’re still talking about it.
I’m just giving my opinion on why that movie is bad.
I know that probably in the States now even liking or not liking a movie is a political statement, and that some people “like it” just because they have to. But it’s a bad movie. I’ve watch a lot of crap, and most times I power through it to at least see the ending. Imagine how bad had to be that I thought that it wasn’t even worth to try to see the whole thing.
Your comment is now an extension of that movie’s plot.
*gestures at all the recycled crap hollywood puts out.
That movie is so amazing
That movie was so difficult to watch
It physically hurt to watch.
I really like the first half of the movie. That feeling of outrage as they try to get attention is just so well done. But the second half just gets too painful. I can’t watch it
Yeah, one of the few good movies I watched that felt emotionally draining. Joker is another good example.