I wanted to like this. I want to like just about everything I watch, but especially this. After Adam McKay found an interesting new direction with ensemble-cast satire based on real-world events with The Big Short, and then slipped in my favour after Vice, I wanted to see him come back on top. This kind of production, a close-to-the-bone allegory for the modern discourse involving man-made climate change and what it’s doing to the planet, is something that could use a bit of levity to clear things up. A splash of comedy to help drive home how important the issue is, and how important it is for us to take it seriously. But that’s not what we get. In fact, for as iffy as I was about Vice, I am all kinds of done with this fucking thing.
Watching this film gave me a sensation I remember quite vividly from back when I used to argue with antivaxxers on Twitter, and indeed most arguments I’ve had on social media. This pervasive feeling of irritation, like my head is burning from the effort, in knowing that no matter how hard I try, it’s pretty much impossible to get the other person in the conversation to see how stupid their stance is on the subject. I could bring up how this kind of unpleasantness is the main reason why I don’t get in such arguments anymore, or how it’s not exactly the reason why I watch movies in the first place, but there’s some degree of reason for it. It is the feeling that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Randall and Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate experience throughout most of the film's narrative, as they try and explain to everyone that, unless they do something really damn quickly, they’re all going to die.
Except the satire here, even with the extended metaphor of a planet-destroying comet in place of anthropogenic climate change, is still way too blunt to be effective as satire. It’s satire in the same way that a Seltzerberg production is spoof, where it takes the exact opposite road to make its point effectively, and hammers it home so damn hard that you’d think the filmmaker in question just assumes their own audience needs everything spelled out for them. Rather than actually playing things up for comedy, everything happening here is pretty much note-for-note what has already happened on our side of the screen in terms of general attitudes. Denial, misguided attempts at meeting halfway, anger, despair, frustration at the lack of urgency; none of this is new. If anything, it’s too familiar, and only managed to bring up my real-world reactions to such things… but without any jocular clarity to make things in any way better.
I mean, this is really bass-ackwards as far as trying to comment on the whole situation. Maybe it’s because I’m an Australian and not as in-tune with American politics as the natives (not that I’d want to be any closer than I already am through social media), but the phrase ‘don’t look up’ immediately makes me think of Trump looking right at a solar eclipse… which is basically the exact opposite of how it plays out in-film. Not only that, but when Randall has one of many breakdowns on-screen and starts ranting about how “not everything needs to sound so goddamn clever or charming or likeable all the time”, it made me question why Adam McKay even made this. When you’re dramatising shit for a movie, you have to at least try to make it in some way clever, charming, and/or likeable in order for it to stick as entertainment with a message. Otherwise, it’s just doomscrolling at 24 frames a second.
Apart from the Kid Cudi/Ariana Grande duet Just Look Up (legitimately a great moment that is basically everything this film should have been in terms of tone), there is nothing here that I haven’t already seen done way better elsewhere. Highlighting the crushing complacency of mankind in the face of its inevitable destruction? Ray Bradbury’s The Last Night Of The World. Jennifer Lawrence being gaslit for two hours as she tries to tell everyone to stop trashing the world? Darren Aronofsky’s mother!. A collective state of depression as a celestial body collides with Earth? Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.
Actually, fuck whatever other comparisons I was going to make: That last one is precisely why this doesn’t work. The end of the world, and all of us along with it, is an inherently depressing topic. It is the existential threat to end all existential threats, and while there’s certainly issues to be had with a doomsday scenario that is directly of our own design in climate change being represented by something set in motion by forces outside of our control (one of the worser attitudes to have concerning climate change) with an impact event, that’s not the issue.
The issue is that, in order to work as McKay likely intended (in-line with Big Short and Vice, which were also about serious topics but from a decidedly cheeky perspective), it really needed to have its comedic aspects nailed down. But considering one of the side characters in this film is literally named ‘General Themes’, and it manages to outclass itself by including a snippet from an episode of Drawn Together (a show which legitimately features funnier and smarter satire than anything found in the film proper), that’s not what happened.
After Bo Burnham: Inside, part of me feels off being so hard on this film on the basis of comedy; there’s room for satire that doesn’t necessarily make the audience laugh, but definitely makes them think and/or feel something. But aside from just not working when it tries to be funny, there’s no catharsis to be had in its very real anger about the current state of the climate change conversation; it’s just more of that same conversation, only written out in its entirety beforehand. I don’t doubt that McKay and everyone in attendance here cares about the topic, but worthy pop activism means more than just pointing at the sky and going “Oh shit”.
No comments:
Post a Comment