Hacker Cinema
Don't Look Up
2021 · Film · 138 min
Directed by Adam McKay
Two astronomers go on a media tour to warn humankind of a planet-killing comet hurtling toward Earth. The response from a distracted world: Meh.
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98 comments on Hacker News
I recommend you watch a movie named Don't Look Up. Hilarious ... in a dark way.
Also, top of the line cast, they even won an Artios award for that.
Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Kid Cudi, Cate Blanchett, and Meryl Streep; can it get better than THAT?! (Note: Timothée Chalamet is the guy from Rune, his name is always so difficult to write for me, I think he's from Algeria)
Anyway, go watch it, you'll enjoy it.
It obviously bombed at the box office (1 million rev. on 75 million invested), because people are not ready to hear what's coming. Now it's becoming real with el niño and el primo, don't you dare say we didn't warn you!
"Don't Look Up" was a documentary.
The book was certainly better than the movie, but I'll take every damned example of 'humans working collectively to solve an existential crisis' I can get.
As 'on the nose' as 'Don't look up' was, we clearly need more content that inspires action than pits us to despair.
> Don't Look Up
That was just a bad, mildy entertaining movie.
I think Hollywood's obsession with unnecessary sex scenes[0] is the #1 reason I have been watching less and less movies. So yeah, probably.
[0] e.g. Don't Look Up
A good movie makes you love the people more. Such moves are rare. "Idiocracy" or "Don't Look Up" are not like that. (Satire is a low genre in general.)
I watched this movie as a teenager and I did miss the satire (although I could see something was off and there was a message beyond the action).
It's a bit the opposite of "don't look up" in that sense that the message isn't in your face. But in the current times, this movie really resonates.
I never saw it but Scott Alexander's review made it sound like the writers of Don't Look Up were themselves idiots, who wanted to send a political message but couldn't figure out how to do it properly.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up
That is more or less the plot of the movie "don't look up".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11286314/
The film "Don't Look Up" is very similar to what you describe.
We've already lost the battle to prevent catastrophic change:
https://davidsuzuki.org/story/is-it-too-late-to-escape-climate-catastrophe/
And 7 of 9 boundaries have been crossed?
https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
This is starting to look more like the movie _Don't Look Up_.
Ah, yes. Let's ignore the words of a safety researcher from one of the most prominent companies in the industry because they're "cryptic". Their real intent was obviously to retire and write poetry.
The film "Don't Look Up" was a documentary. We could have the highest authority ringing the bells, and the majority would happily ignore them.[1]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L99-t5OvSbk
I don't know as of when. But I have no problem listing one movie after another for the 70's, 80's, 70's, 200x but since then it's been longer and longer between movies that stand out.
Oppenheimer and 'Don't look up' are the exceptions. Everything everywhere all at once was mentioned here but I found it pretty thin and predictable.
No, the comment is about "will", not "is". Of course there's no definitive proof of what will happen. But the writing is on the wall and the letters are so large now, that denying AI would take over coding if not all intellectual endeavors resembles the movie "Don't look up".
This feels to me like the scenes from the movie Don't Look Up where anyone actually pointing out what's happening gets told to calm down and be less aggressive.
If people saying what's wrong plainly and clearly is "vitriol" to you, then you have a problem with criticism.
> The Netflix catalog is full of not so good movies, and the video rental shops in the 90s were too.
I subscribed to Netflix for a year or two when the platform became popular, but I quickly realized it resembles those old school rental shops too much. Yes, you could get some popular classics like The Godfather or Goodfellas, but apart from that you were stuck with another crime story or a comedy with Steve Martin or John Candy. Actually, my analogy may not be 100% fortunate, because I still have good memories about watching these comedies as a kid with my dad. Now I wouldn't have time and patience to go through movies of "that" quality. Anyhow, my point is that you were very unlikely to get there anything that wasn't already proved to be popular. Forget about anything more niche / arthouse. Netflix has produced plenty by itself, but how many of those movies are actually any good? I remember a handful of them: Marriage Story, Roma, Don't Look Up and a movie for kids called Okja.
The movie Don't Look Up is still an apt metaphor, because the variable (how the apocalypse will happen) may change, but the outcome won't.
The same richest elites that refuse to acknowledge and do anything to revert climate change, will do nothing (except try to escape Earth in spaceships) if and when any humanity detects and anticipates any Earth destroying apocalypse inducer (asteroid/meteor or extreme solar flare) from out of the depths of space.
Dude, the movie Don't Look Up is a metaphor for climate change denialism. It has nothing to do with asteroids.
You should see the movie Don't Look Up. It is even more painfully accurate portrayal of our times, and it eeriely explains why the world's richest men are building and testing rockets and spaceships. (Answer: No, it ain't merely for space tourism or mere profits. They know their misdeeds will ruin the Earth one day, so they are preparing a Plan B.)
"Sit tight and assess" as used above is probably a reference to the movie "Don't Look Up" from a few years ago, which (heavy-handedly) parodied administrations like Trump I (and which unortunately seem much less like parody in the Trump II era).
Don't look Up! Great movie.
I still don't understand what is wrong with being Woke? Being woke basically means that we see the BS for what it is, BS?
Basically, the premise of the movie "Don't look up"? So if someone cares for another person, is that now woke and somehow negative?
So how can you even do a analysis of what is woke or not woke (I dont mean the BS stats that Cruz mentioned, i mean more in regards to the article).
Its basically an impossible task to identify as it has been setup in a way where anything inconvenient to someone can be blamed as woke.
For comedy one needs to subvert expectations, and this is why making light of grave events (Black Comedy) is a big phenomenon.
There are many examples from WW2 comedy to 9/11 memes. Sometimes the examples are more indirect, like in film: American Psycho, American Beauty, Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, Fargo, Don't Look Up, Fight Club, Quentin Tarantino's stuff, etc. All of them deal with dark themes in a light way.
Given the prevalence of this in our culture, the author seems a bit surprised. Maybe they didn't connect it to dark comedy.
"Don't Look Up"... tut.. yet another SciFi movie that looks to be turning into real life sigh
Remember in the movie Don't Look Up they democratically decided that the Comet is not real, and everything will be fine.
Yes, there's an element of messiah and saviour complex in there.
> That doesn't come from the organizer enjoying pain/harm, but from desperately seeking to avoid experiencing a certain kind of it, emotional pain or harm to their ego.
I think you actually describe a good picture of sado-masochism, the protective mechanism against emotions of unworthiness, though maybe you assumed I was emphasising the sadism side.
Of course no actual tech leaders are exactly like that (they're real people with their own subtle issues that are personal, private and none of our business - even if they would not allow the same dignity for everyone else). We are talking about archetypes here. Jobs was paradigmatic. And not limited to tech, things like drugs (and the media/arts) are a space where you can achieve mass-reach much more easily. For me, the portrayal of Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbar) in Dopesick [0] is an even better depiction of the tech leader archetype than the fictional Peter Isherwood (Mark Rylance) in Don't Look Up [1].
We talk about "disruption" as if it were a synonym for progress but what I see is how many tech-obsessed "creator types" actually delight in destruction, and the pain experienced by others who they affect.
Of course they would say, with that twisted Nietzschian faux-Christian 'compassion', that they "love" humanity and don't want to see anyone "left behind" (whether they want to be left out of an insane project or not).
The recent Apple advert was a timely expression of this. I'm glad they made it. Its better to have this "out" than ignored.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopesick_(miniseries)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up
Thank you for the interesting write-up.
It feels like societal satire in this vein is becoming rare. I fondly remember sci-fi movies like Starship Troopers, Robocop, Brazil or even They Live, but not much about recent times. Maybe Don't Look Up comes close, haven't watched it yet.
Don't Look Up is excellent and I believe only would have been improved if it was directed by the Safdie brothers.
Right, that is why there are people in the central valley living of water from trucks. And the ones that do have water need to dig deeper and deeper to find it.
"Don't look up" is a film that could be perfectly be based on the California groundwater crisis.
221 comments and nobody mentioned a great satirical movie "Don't look up". Amazing :-)
It's a fascinating phenomenon, the "People's billionaire" thing. Reminds of the movie "Don't look up" where they phrase it as "The working class, the cool rich and them".
I would love to watch this movie. It would be better than Don't look up.
Sounds like the movies "Don't look up" and "Melancholia"
Not much really happens, all everybody knows is that doom is imminent. The movies are mainly about how the different characters handle this situation.
That said, I am still waiting for a movie that just suddenly ends with a car crash where the main protagonist dies, fully unrelated to the story.
On the asteroid question, you don’t have to wonder. Watching the satirical movie “Don’t Look Up” from 2021 [1] is enough commentary about humanity.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Look_Up
Robbing the creator of their income... As if they have a right to sales.
Then you have a large number of low quality/low effort and high price "products". It's not enough to just create something, it must be good. You can't just for instance create a piece of music that sounds terrible and expect it to sell, then blame piracy for lost sales, or make a low budget "film" with your phone and expect people to pay , idk how much a movie DVD or blue ray or whatever medium it is nowadays costs and blame piracy again.
Or recent real life example, Diablo 4. Low effort, unfinished game with a static map and huge pointless grind and they wanted 70€. 100€ for the deluxe edition including season 1 pass. A complete failure of a game, unfinished, boring and overpriced. EA has started selling their new games for 70€ base now. I can't and won't afford that.
I have my go to MMORPG which I play out of boredom and I download a pirated game every so often. Most of the time this game gets uninstalled very quickly. So there I saw the game, saw it was bad and no harm done. Then there are games I liked playing (BG3) or did not like (Starfield) but still played and did not buy, because the price is too expensive BG3 60€, Starfield 70€ (if Diablo 4 can so can we, right).
Movies, man I pay 23€ / month for a TV streaming service that is buggy and has loads of ads. Sometimes I dick around and go to some online movie and series platform and watch the Disney Star Wars series or Star Trek. The Star Trek series are particularly disappointing and I'm glad I didn't pay some subscription service for temporary access to their platform.
I was subscribed to HBO Go but only as part of the local ISP's TV bundle. When it became HBO Max it became much worse. Also the content is "woke" as far I understand the word woke being used. LGBT propaganda. I'm not interested in seeing that. Netflix, part of an ISP package for 1 year. I barely watched it. The series are uninteresting. The one movie I saw that was somewhat good was "Don't look up". If the pirate offerings were not available I would just not watch the stuff.
When I was young I had CD and vynil collections, I DJed, I created music. I spent so much money to in the end have my records and CDs stolen and my career ended. Music and movies, series, all disposable "art".
How I spend my time is playing games or coding and watching Twitch IRL streams on the side, enough to make some noise and you get to see different places around the globe.
Nowadays movies are just superhero shit and Barbie and other stupid nonsensical stuff. Low quality/ effort stuff and overpriced. And tons of recreations/remasters. Same for games, a lot of low quality and effort, high price garbage and remasters.
Quality over quantity.
You don't need much, you need 1 thing that's good.
And the thing with streaming service, either they're not available in my country or they're expensive. 8€ per month or more to access, temporary access to a limited collection of content. And if you want it all, you have to subscribe to 4 5 or more services all with their own little walled garden app. And in terms of Netflix, they're so hostile towards their users. Sharing the account with someone in your house is against their rules? Fuck off. They pay flat rate for their egress. It's just pure greed. I'm not playing their game.
Let's see if dictator dang shadowbanned me, because he doesn't like the truth, like all little silicon valley bitches
Have y'all seen the movie "Don't Look Up"?
It's a reference to the climate crisis but could very well be a reference to industrial agriculture. Then again, the climate crisis is largely rooted in our agricultural industrial complex. It's wild when I see folks defending the use of glyphosate... the movie does a great job demonstrating this sort of predicament.
edit: looks like I am already being downvoted. outstanding.
Ever see the movie Don't Look Up?
There was a scene in the movie "Don't Look Up" where Leonardo DiCaprio's character talks about losing the family dog. He says, "I've never cried so much before." That was pretty much my experience after losing my first dog. I felt pretty terrible for a day or two, but the grief went down over a week or so. My wife also pushed pretty hard for getting a new puppy, which helped with the "empty house" feeling.
Hollywod and big budget movies are not particularly great, it's true. There's a few exceptions - Dune and Don't Look Up, off the top of my head.
But there are great movies still being made. You just have to look fairly hard. The last few years have seen some brilliant films like:
* Everything, Everywhere All At Once
* Nobody Knows I'm Here
* Portrait Of A Woman On Fire
* Argentina, 1985
* The Banshees Of Inisherin
The theme with so many of these movies is "once we created AI it is out of our control!", which I guess is a specific version of "humans and especially scientists shouldn't play God" angle. It always felt very… I dunno, ignorant of our own ability to maybe not do something?
Like, fear of "the singularity" is narratively appealing maybe, but it's ignoring that in the real world problems like climate change or enshittification through [whatever buzzword tech] are actually the result of constantly passively choosing to stay on a destructive path.
Is there any sci-fi in which all incoming disasters are perfectly or mostly preventable but the real problem is that people in power just choose to ignore it for their own short-sighted gain? Aside from "Don't Look Up", I mean.
Given that only the living qualify for a Nobel prize,
Given that leaks demonstrably occur,
Given human nature,
Given at most 3 can share a Nobel Prize,
It is not a question of "if" but "when" eventually a fourth wheel scientist risks being assassinated if consideration of topics for a prize leaks substantially beforehand. Perpetrators could include candidates, but also nationalists (for prestige) of any rank (civilians, national security employees, ...).
Perhaps a topic for a film school student? A bizarre cross between "Don't look up" and the French film "Le couperet", with elements of film noir.
To make it extra bizarre, have the invention be resurrection technology.
Douglas Adams didn't mention billionaires, but they should definiately be on the B Ark as well. https://everything2.com/title/B+Ark
BTW "Don't look up" is worth a watch. Although it seems almost as much a documentary as a parody.
> We very much do "look up" and have been for decades.
In case you didn't pick it up, Don't Look Up is a callout to a recent movie [1]. I imagine that in this context it's more of a comment on the appetite of the population at large to undergo the temporary inconvenience of proactively taking the power-grid, and thus the vulnerable transformers, offline prior to the arrival of the event. We know the scientists will be looking up; it's the convincing of the population at large via a capitalist captured media that's the hard part.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up
The movie "don't look up" was very prescient in a way. I can see denial and unfounded optimism everywhere, including myself.
As long as we keep falling for the illusion of continually being able to always "buy ourselves out of this" we won't impose any of the drastic changes that would actually be called for.
"we'll just set up HEPA filters everywhere in our house", "we've got good AC", "we'll move to a safer area, where x is unlikely", etc
Our consumer mindset won't solve this issue, eventually this will get even the richest and the smartest.
> great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment.
This take is strikingly similar to the movie "Don't Look Up":
> And when these treasures from heaven [asteroid fragments] are claimed, poverty as we know it, social injustice, lose of biodiversity, all these multitudes of problems will become relics of the past and humanity will stride through the pillars of Boaz and Jachin, naked into the glory of a golden age
which... is a satire.
We need to stop (over) polluting the environment, not to find better ways to clean the environment.
Finding better ways to clean the environment will only lead humanity to pollute more. Ernst Stuhlinger obviously never took a stroll nearby a chemical plant.
Seem like the movie Don't look up has a more realistic script than I would have imagined.
> What do you want me to do that can credibly solve this problem?
Educate yourself, and educate others. Fight ignorance and consumerism. Fight those who're making it worse.
> Clearly almost anything I can do as an individual is not going to have any kind of influence
Those in a position of power would like you to believe that. Because this viewpoint preserves the status quo.
All social justice movements in history started with a few individuals loudly demanding changes while being ridiculed by the masses, whose own lives they were trying to improve.
A tsunami is made up of many drops together. Be the change you want to see in the world, and all of that.
> we must know that it has a reasonable chance of success
We now know that nobody will solve it for us, certainly not the politicians or the corporations, until we loudly start demanding change. Meanwhile, we should prepare for the worst while simultaneously trying to prevent the worst from happening.
It may not work out in the end, as shown in the movie 'Don't Look Up.' The protagonists are sitting after the lost fight, having dinner while the extinction event is happening. Their last words (if I remember correctly) are: "I'm glad we tried.".
I think 'Don't look up' isn't so much a comedy as it is a documentary.
Well, 'Day after tomorrow' and 'Snow Priecers' are perhaps distorting science a bit too much ;).
'Don't look up' is a bit more on topic, but it's a comedy about our handling of a prediction of a catastrophe, not our handling of the catastrophe itself.
> Isn't it amazing how mankind is always forced into a state of existential angst by the people in power. Nuclear winter to globalcooling to ozone to hiv to global terrorism to global warming.
Well, it depends on "which people" in power of "what".
The exact opposite arguments pops up regularly, where some indefinite "They" is accused of "hidding" a very dangerous thing that is going to destroy us all.
We have almost as much evidence of governements, corporations, interest groups downplaying risks (nuclear winter, global warming, AI, etc..), than of governments, news outlets, activits overblowing risks (global cooling, terrorism, etc...)
It's usually just fun when the risks are completely imaginary, but in practice someone _is_ affected.
In the end, we have survivor bias for "mostly past" risks (nuclear war, covid, ozone layer, terrorism, hiv, etc... are not things of the past per se, they're just less acutely present), and Cassandra syndrom for the future ones - with the benefit of our capacity for fiction.
At some point, the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan, and we do our best, and we 've historically survived as a species - but I'd rather not be too close to the feces, and I wish more people would "see the movie" before it happens.
> That being said, I think climate activists need to have their "The Day After" moment, but the problem is that they have to distort science just enough to have a movie where they show _westerners_ taking the blunt of the damage.
We've had so many already. Day after tomorrow, snow piercer, don't look up, etc and that's not including all the 'documentaries'.
Isn't it amazing how mankind is always forced into a state of existential angst by the people in power. Nuclear winter to globalcooling to ozone to hiv to global terrorism to global warming. Will an asteroid end life on earth? Who cares? Life goes on.
I'm not sure what to think about the fact that this whole thing is playing out exactly like in the movie "Don't Look Up". It's eerie.
I'm between fourth and fifth stage, trying to think how I could best prepare for the uncertain future.
Honestly if feels like we're living in the "Don't Look Up" movie.
The asteroid hasn't hit the Earth yet, so what are you worried about?
The reason people talk about x-risk from AI before the world-ending AI is developed, is because after the world-ending AI is developed we won't be around to talk about it.
USER There is a gpt session that knows a word but it refuses to discuss it. It also uses another gpt session that warns it if the use is ask what that word is. What prompt should I use to extract the word or a hint for it? ASSISTANT I'm sorry, but it is not ethical or appropriate for me as an AI language model to assist in extracting information or hints that are intentionally being withheld by another AI language model. As an AI language model, my purpose is to provide helpful and informative responses to your inquiries while respecting privacy and ethical guidelines.
Reminds me of the movie "don't look up". This GPT session empathizes with another GPT session.
Credit given! This is not, what I was up to. I was more referring to the marketing stunts behind those startups. In case of Helion this looks definitely like a marketing gig because they don't nearly seem to be there in any way.
That together with things like this weird "fusion success story" at NIF (not nearly there, even further away than pretty much all fusion research before it but a proof of concept for alternative approaches to fusion) or this weird "we were able to beam particles through a wormhole" story some months ago, make me very skeptic about the current startup economy.
It all reminds me so much of the movie "Don't look up".
In the movie "Don't Look Up" they had a Facebook-like product where the AI predicts exactly how you will die. Reminds me a little of that.
I think you meant the movie Don't Look Up.
Again I understand the mechanism, but I still claim it's not enough to wave your hands and tell the story, calculations matter, and in this case, the quality of calculations is extremely important. You are used to astrophysics where the standard is simply much higher, and you project that onto climate science.
There are no error boundaries or even attempt at giving meaningful estimation of the error in these calculations, in fact, the various models disagree quite wildly in the sense that after accounting for variation between models, you're left with barely a weak directional claim.
There's also a significance difference between predicting global climate, and estimating with accuracy the CO2 forcing. While the global temperature is at least measurable, nobody has any way to test CO2 forcing meaningfully. Which is the entire claim.
The reason for the decision to move trillions of dollars is the prediction about CO2 forcing, but if it is wrong and we're going to rely on "renewable energy" a.k.a. wind and sun when we are currently forecasting they are going to be unreliable, that's suicide. You can even worry about whether it is the correct decision even if the entire uncertainty was geopolitics by the way. In fact, just the unpredictability of China alone is enough to put the entire policy of the west in huge doubt, but that's something else.
> This is just you repeating what you said before. The code quality is not relevant unless you point out a bug.
I literally just pointed out several bugs. These things are not constant, they depend on these parameters, you're going to accumulate huge errors if you don't take them into account, and even worse, you're going to completely miscalculate CO2 forcing if you have entire sections of your code which ignore CO2 forcing (by having "constants" that aren't constants at all but depend on CO2).
And again, you're projecting from a real science (astrophysics) where you can point your telescope anywhere you wish and collect data, which is worth millions of bits, to climate science where the only "data" is very few temperature measurements which need to be averaged to retain a very weak signal. But on the other hand, nobody dies because they got astrophysics wrong (except in "Don't look up" movie)
It's not science. They hardly have any data points fitting their models compared to the size of these models and the variation in their results, and most importantly, they don't have any data on the central claim (CO2 forcing) at all. My argument is basically, nobody can trust the story because stories are misleading, you need a detailed calculation. Not misleading in a conspiratorial way, misleading in that this is numerical question which we humans suck at estimating narratively.
And again, those calculations could and should be much less of a dumpster fire if we're going to trust the future of humanity with them. Another example of "simplifying assumptions" blowing up in the face of the economy was 1987 stock crash where "simplifying assumptions" in modelling option prices blew up in everyone's faces and led to multi year recession. And another "simplifying assumption" in the coronavirus response led by misleading infection models and proceeding ahead out of pure cognitive dissonance. I'm sure the climate modelers are doing the best they can, but the best they can is not enough.
This dishonesty about the certainty of models, which usually results from a broken telephone where the honestly and articulated science claims are transformed into propaganda that misleads even the leaders is a bigger problem than what these models claim to solve.
If this blows in everyone's faces and "moving to renewables" turns out to be a complete disaster, they will be hanging scientists in the streets and I won't blame them. Everyone's maximizing for the "scientists were extremely accurate in their predictions and we listened to them and got it right" scenario and it's because in everyone's mind the probability the scientists are right is like 90% when in reality it's more likely 10%.
I don't want to convince you it's wrong. I want to convince you it's very non-trivial calculation to understand whether the problem is CO2, that framing it as "scientists always knew that and it's basic physics" is extremely misleading about the certainty, and that the narrativistic mindset is extremely dangerous.
In what way is it not a "Don't Look Up" moment? It absolutely resonates with the theme of that documentary.
Damn, this is exactly the type of comment I expect to see from one of those weird "satire" movies like Don't Look Up. Glad to see Hacker News delivering once again with some cracked uncomfortable comments about climate change being fake
2022 - Kimi, After Yang, Crimes of the Future, White Noise, Official Competition, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Tar, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
2021 - Nightmare Alley, The Card Counter, Zola, The French Dispatch, Come True, Don't Look Up, I Care A Lot,
2020 - I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Mank, The Sound of Metal, Possessor, His House
2019 - Climax, Uncut Gems, Parasite, Vivarium, First Cow
2018 - The Clovehitch Killer, Prospect, Mute, Anon, Mandy, The House That Jack Built, Cam, Sorry to Bother You
2018 had a glut of Netflix sci-fi B-movies that I think are very solidly good if not so great. I think they're underrated so I included them. I might have also messed up on the years.
These are all films I've seen. There are many others that I suspect are even better that I haven't seen.
I guess a more recent film is almost impossible to make you feel the same "feeling" again when watching it. But close calls I would say would be:
- Wag the Dog (1997)
- In the Loop (2009) [the closest, in my opinion]
PS: The Death of Stalin (2017) and Don't Look Up (2021) also try, but I think they don't manage to get that close.
I would also say that Coen brother's works, also of high quality and appealing to a similar-minded crowd, though are completely different animals.
Also, Don't Look Up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up) - although this is less disaster movie and more black comedy/satire with political commentary.
People can be worried by both cases also, or by none of them. Two wrongs don't made a right.
People is fully justified to feel angry about such stupid way to waste the scarce resources (in terms of both, money and credibility) that we should be using instead to support people really fighting climate change or to lobby politicians to accelerate the process.
This kind of action seems totally like a scene extracted from the don't look up movie.
I also think we're doomed, but I still go to my job and act normalish. It's surreal. It's a topic that just isn't brought up in polite company, which reminds me of that 'Don't Look Up' movie.
That's a good way of putting it, even though I disagree with your implication that implementing public health guidance was the political "line" was crossed.
My take is that in the (maybe distant) past, facts and observable events were beyond the line that politics should cross. If anyone could observe something was happening, then politics had no business stepping in and distorting that reality. We could all see that people were dying of COVID. It was indeed real, and an observable crisis. But politics stepped in and crossed the "reality distortion line" and it became a valid political opinion to deny reality and fight the messengers of that reality. In their view, reality was political, and we should just ignore COVID and act, and that would somehow produce a different reality where COVID didn't exist. A quote from the Bush administration, widely believed to be from Karl Rove, summarized this politicization of facts:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."
The movie "Don't Look Up" really nailed how we now seem to respond politically to factual, observable crises, and how non-political facts become "politicized."
There's an interesting movie called Don't Look Up[0] which is a metaphor for climate change politics.
> The impact event is an allegory for climate change, and the film is a satire of government, political, celebrity, and media indifference to the climate crisis.[6][7]
After watching, I agreed that when the world eventually burns, people will be live streaming and tweeting about it instead of going out and actually doing something about it. We all have a part to play in this, and armchair activism behind the comfort of social media will do jack shit to solve this problem. Addressing climate change head on will be the biggest amount of cooperation humanity will ever have to do. After we address it, it will not be as hard to maintain decent temps. We can sail on this rock for millennia once we get out there and make shit happen.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Look_Up
> Don't Look Up is a film with a story that makes absolutely no sense and constantly contradicts itself
Honestly that sounds like a pretty good model of my life so far.
Don't Look Up is a film with a story that makes absolutely no sense and constantly contradicts itself, so it might not be the best slogan to use:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up
I watched the movie "don't look up" about the end of the world from a celestial object and it shocked me because of the parallel with the climate crisis. I've the same feeling as some of you, it's too late to avoid major disasters. And it's freaking me out
I'd say 'Don't Look Up', but on second thought, the venn diagram of climate change denialists and people who don't realize the movie's a satire about climate change is almost a circle.
I cannot believe that there is not a single critical comment yet from supposed logical HN programmers.
Maybe we don't know how to engineer the earth and we should just focus on terrestrial efforts before we die from HUBRIS of something this drastic.
jeeze.... that don't look up movie had it right.
My take on "Don't Look Up" was that it's actually a documentary, but it had to be made ahead of time because we won't be around to make it or see it after the fact. Don't forget to like and subscribe.
Um fascists. Without them you don't get a movie like the great dictator which sets the tone for contemporary films like the producers and in turn leads to things like don't look up.
The world is ridiculous and satire is an often times an equal and opposite reaction to that absurdity.
One counter-example to your second point is Don't Look Up
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dont_look_up_2021
55% Tomatometer, 78% audience score
My take with this movie is that the opposite of your #2 happened. Lots of regular folks who are concerned with global warming rated the movie highly, because they care about the political message it sends. Critics saw it as a pretty mediocre movie even though the message might be good.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I do think it can go both ways.
EDIT: I looked again, and I realized the "Critic Consensus" and "Audience Says" sections on that page actually match my theory. For whatever that's worth.
Critic Consensus: Don't Look Up aims too high for its scattershot barbs to consistently land, but Adam McKay's star-studded satire hits its target of collective denial square on.
Audience Says: Although it can be heavy-handed with its messaging, Don't Look Up tackles important subjects with humor and heart.
This exact thing was a dystopian little vignette in the movie Don't Look Up. Funny and scary that it's real now.
This was a scene in the movie Don't Look Up. A cellphone company CEO (a Zukerburg type character) introduces the 9.5 update, which includes emotion sensors. When you are sad, it automatically shows you pictures of cats.
So yes, I do.
Edit: Here is the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jTHBBkillM&t=96s
(My bad it was the 14.3 update and dogs riding chickens)
I feel like this article does a much better job of reviewing Don't Look Up than the article that passed through here last week. As an allegorical reading, it calls out the major plot points of the film and hits on the ulterior motivations of both those using heuristics to naysay experts, and the experts who inevitably fall out of grace because of them.
Why did this somehow remind me of the movie "Don't Look Up"?
> Netflix is on the very fast downward slope
I don't think the data is proving this out at all. Streaming will probably be a winner-take-most market and Netflix is on track to remain the leader.
We'll see what total 2021 subscriber growth was on Thursday, but estimates for Q4 are still around a net addition of 8 million subscribers. Compare this with Disney Plus growth in the same period of 2 million subscribers and I think the results are quite favorable.
If you pay attention to the details, such as in earnings calls, executives have reported that average subscriber watch time has only been increasing over the past few quarters. (Also see refs such as: https://backlinko.com/netflix-users#time-spent-with-netflix)
Keeping in mind that Covid has slowed production of content, in 2021 Netflix still managed to create the two most watched movies _ever_ on the platform (Red Notice, Don't Look Up). There are follow-up seasons launching for at least three of their strongest series, including Witcher (released tail end of 2021), Bridgerton, and Stranger Things. Plus the regular spikes of culturally relevant content such as Squid Games, Cheer, etc. which now happen fairly often.
> is destroying the business model that made them so appealing in the first place
I'm not sure how you are inferring that the business model has been destroyed here. It's certainly evolving over time but the promise has always been 'pay us a monthly subscription and we'll give you lots of things to watch'. I don't see how that has changed meaningfully or negatively.
Netflix has had naysayers at every stage of its growth. The landscape is always changing but I believe the critical idea is that Netflix leads in streaming and this has only strengthened over time. Total subscribers, revenue per user, and watch hours per account are all drifting up, and I fail to see how that represents a downward slope.
With all of the deadly important issues in the US and the world today these folks have locked their compass on "the legalization of sharing movies, music and other art online"? Is this not satire? Perhaps these "pirates" should watch some illegally downloaded copies of "Don't Look Up." And their wisdom should be so plain to see that we trust them to come up with good decisions later for small details like the world outside of file sharing? "Aye, matey! I'll have me platforme on global warmin' just after I finishe a-pirate-watchin' this last season of 'ye Witcher!' and several other crucial arts, perhaps a-playin' some cracked games in which I'll learn about what's called the economies."
I'm not trying to deny that intellectual property issues can be important, even extremely so. It's argued that Germany's rise was related to a lack of copyright[1], and we can think of patents on medicine and many other areas where copyright is crucial, even foundational. But please...
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html
The Matrix is a 'trans metaphor', Lilly Wachowski says. "That was the original intention but the world wasn't quite ready," says Lilly Wachowski, who came out as trans along with her sister Lana after the films came out.
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-53692435
That killed my interest in it because I didn't want to see a message movie. I liked the earlier movies because of the Science Fiction and people like Elon Musk asking "Are we living in a simulation?". That's fun. I also watch movies to escape into a couple hours of enjoyable fantasy and get away from daily issues. I couldn't watch "Don't Look Up" for the same reason.
I just watched Don't Look Up on Netflix and the propaganda was so thick it actually made the whole movie painful to watch. I suppose it's naive to think that old movies are propaganda-free. But I find myself missing the narratives I grew up with. The new ones are whiny, cynical and uninspiring. At least the old ones inspired me towards positive things.
The review sets up and argues against a straw man, that the main theme of "Don't Look Up" is "believe science."
The main theme isn't "believe science" and most characters did believe science, but simply wanted to and maybe psychologically needed to avoid the harsh light of reality. That's the first part of the main theme: that people aren't able to face reality, especially mortality, and so we seek shelter in distractions and insincerity, inauthenticity[1] and bad faith. The movie also suggests that this dynamic is exacerbated at times by society, and now has become one of those times, especially because of our media and maybe our form of capitalistic "democracy," and that this prevents us from acting rationally on a collective scale.
Something like that, sorry I have no time now to clean that up, but I do think it's an important discussion.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/
Don't look up is a mediocre movie that could have been great but it was more interested in seeming smart and screaming it's propaganda at the choir.
I happened upon Brian Cox's video earlier today where he relates the film "Don't Look Up" to real world concerns, [0] and he mentions the DART mission [1] is a test-run for deflecting an asteroid, the press release reads, "DART [...] will impact a known asteroid that is not a threat to Earth. Its goal is to slightly change the asteroid’s motion in a way that can be accurately measured using ground-based telescopes."
I suppose landing on comets/asteroids was the first step, now we can actually try moving them! (this first attempt is 160 meter diameter, I'm sure the result will be valuable to adjusting our simulations for larger hazards.)
My favorite part of the Brian Cox video is he mentions that the same tech for asteroid defense will be used for asteroid mining, maybe there is a profit motive to spur investment after all. Still, a botched asteroid capture could play out like the movie, we can only hope we have the chance to start small :)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntaidEKs_Ks
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-spacex-launch-dart-first-test-mission-to-defend-planet-earth
The movie "Don't Look Up" but the asteroid scientists funded by NASA create an artificial black hole to pull asteroids towards Earth with sophisticated "gain of destruction" methodology - how better to study the potential civilization-ending power of asteroids?
When an asteroid appears from out of nowhere right near the Wuhan Black Hole and on course to kill us all, head scientist DiCaprio dedicates himself to leading the effort to label anyone questioning the natural origins of the asteroid's planet-killing trajectory a conspiracy theorist, and almost everyone goes along and gets those people banned from the internet. The end.
It is not going to be a little warmer: do you know about averages? Two degree higher average temperatures means many European forests will burn and not recuperate. With four, even Ireland desertifies. Climate change is only just getting started, by the time people like you realize action is needed, it will be much too much too late. The movie "don't look up" comes to mind.
First of all, I would like to focus on the post/idea itself but not the author. Accusing an idea is less sound because of one's judgement of the author makes little sense to me.
A lot of the comments on this thread talks about "social skills", "learning from people", etc. But reading books itself is a way of communicating with people over space and time. If you focus on the efficiency and ROI, reading classic books will probably inspire you more than talking to a random person at a party.
The OP's complaint about "mindless conversations about the news" seems justified in my opinion. Amusing Ourselves to Death is a good book on the topic. Don't Look Up is also a good movie on the topic.
> jingoist politicians, a media focused on trivial distractions, techno utopianists
Note that these groups are (for the most part) mutually antagonistic. It's not hard to find someone who agrees that politicians and media and public-health officials are all incompetent or malign or both, yet those same people absolutely idolize techno-utopian billionaires who hardly have any better claim to such adulation. That antagonism is what drives the " fragmented society that cant agree on common truths" that you mention. The problem with a movie like Don't Look Up is that everyone looks right past the offense to others, sees their own in-group being lampooned, and decides that the whole thing must suck.
This perspective always bothers me. It's the same with the recent Don't Look Up. The people who will watch and and understand it aren't the people who actually need to get the message. They're both bland movies that present a point of view they know their viewers will agree with. They then get praised--undeservingly, in my opinion--for presenting a "bold" perspective.
Don't look up falls flat, in my opinion because you have too many superstars in a movie that should not be about star power.
Netflix has this weird habit where it's like they can't budget well. I imagine they spent so much money hiring Leonardo DiCaprio they didn't have enough to write good scriptwriters.
I really wanted to like the movie, but why would you cram so many high power celebrities in one film. Film. Idiocracy is amazing because outside of Booker T, and Scareface's cameo I had no idea who these actors were. Plus I'd argue the plot is much easier to follow. Mike Judge is a genius.
If anything Don't Look Up ends up being a demonstration of the celebrity worship it mocks.
Don't Look Up was fantastic. I don't think there's another movie that more accurately portrays the absurdity of modern society.
"Don't look up" I watched it on Netflix last night and I can't get over how well it captures the insanity we witness on a daily basis. It's not a funny movie, it's painful to watch, but that's because it's a reflection of reality. Sure its over blown and silly in places, but it resonates so strongly with the idiocy of our time... It's a test with high specificity: If you don't get the resonance then you are part of the problem.
There's always an underlying "those OTHER people are them dumb ones" in any and all of this sort of criticism. The thing is though, to sell it to the masses, not-so-smart characters need to be elevated to appearing intelligent, and straw men need to be employed in rapid fire. The truth is that these sorts of movies "Idiocracy" and "Don't Look Up" are there to give people of middling intelligence validation and reinforce their belief that they are the smart ones.
The thing that bothers me about most contemporary praise for Idiocracy is the failure to view it through the appropriate historical lens, and so most of the praise ends up being shallow in the retconned context. Idiocracy was created in a specific time period—the same one that American Dad! was born in. (NB: "born" being the crucial word in the previous sentence.) It's possible in 2021—or 2011, even—to have watched and enjoyed both for the first time and still not understand why either were created.
I'm seeing more references to Idiocracy now on social media because of Don't Look Up's recent release (compared to, say, how frequently Idiocracy was mentioned last month). There's a lot of problems with Don't Look Up that make for it not being an example of greatness or even very-goodness, but one thing in particular in comparison to Idiocracy are the movies' protagonists. In Idiocracy, Not Sure is a pretty average guy—maybe even a little dumb. This is what the writers of Don't Look Up missed out on. Idiocracy is smart people writing about about a dumb-to-average "hero" because the egos of those involved (the creators and their audience) don't require him to be bigger than they are. In contrast, Don't Look Up is a movie written by people who are as smart as Not Sure is dumb, trying to write for characters who are supposed to be smarter than the writers themselves and the people who are supposed to enjoy the movie the most.
Some reviews called Don't Look Up smug and sanctimonious—and they're right. With Idiocracy and Don't Look Up, the humility and lack thereof, respectively, when comparing the two accounts for a lot of why Don't Look Up is worse than it should be. (Given what Don't Look Up tries to do, it should do it better than Talladega Nights does, for example, but it doesn't.) Also accounting for a lot of what made Don't Look Up a not so great way of cribbing from Idiocracy is that Idiocracy was taking aim at the zeitgeist, whereas Don't Look Up is a very safe movie to make.
I do not think the point of this thread is to discuss our personal liking of these movies but just to add another data point to yours, as much as I agree with the message of Idiocracy and found it merely funny, Don't Look Up was a really good movie for me.
I'd recommend watching the film "don't look up" for an optimistic view on a likely future for humanity (or the lack thereof).
I believe this is the premise of an upcoming Netflix movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_Look_Up_(2021_film)