“Don’t Look Up” is a Meteoric Hit on Netflix
January 6, 2022
The cautionary allegory of government and media paralysis on climate change has become the third most watched movie in Netflix history in just 11 days.
with Peter Sinclair
The cautionary allegory of government and media paralysis on climate change has become the third most watched movie in Netflix history in just 11 days.
"The sharpest climate denier debunker on YouTube."
- TreeHugger
"@PeterWSinclair is a national treasure." - Brad Johnson, Publisher Hill Heat
January 6, 2022 at 1:13 pm
The negative reviews seem to be focused on the movie “preaching to the choir” when it seems to me the whole point is to reassure us that we’re not crazy, and the media/public response to a real crisis is as screwed up as it seems.
January 6, 2022 at 6:40 pm
The problem with allegories and metaphors is that their meaning is in the eye of the beholder, not necessarily in the intention of the originator. The Matrix for instance became very popular with Q Anon followers.
“Don’t Look Up” can be seen as displaying government colluding with big business to deceive the people and Republicans will see the President as a Democrat and vice versa.
The film is totally US-centric as if the rest of the world did not exist. If it was to really reflect the tragedy of the politics of climate change it would have had a vast movement of astronomers from around the world arguing for action, not a lonely PhD student and a fickle professor.
If Q Anon helps convince a few climate scientists that getting out there and facing the slings and arrows of outrageous deniers is worthwhile or if it inspires another Greta Thunberg, then it will have achieved something. Whether it will sway public opinion by itself is another thing.
January 6, 2022 at 8:42 pm
I liked this movie. It spends two hours showing how absurd our political and media systems have become and two minutes showing, with considerable grace, how the victims of this absurdity accept their fate. Lesson: climate change is a joke… until its not. I hope the lesson is driven home. Trump is a clown. But the sobering victims of his clownhood are growing up in your home, and it ain’t funny what he plans to do to them.
January 7, 2022 at 1:25 am
Bill McKibben Jan. 6, 2022, 9:33 a.m – “The biggest news story of all time doesn’t quite fit our working definition of news, and hence is going remarkably undercovered. ”
https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/just-a-little-too-slow-why-journalists-struggle-to-cover-climate-change/