I’m baffled that this wasn’t apparently as obvious a Trump reference to some as the film really made it out to be. They swapped some things around - the genders, and the direction of the creepy sexual obsession - but it’s pretty much an aggregate Trump children reference with bits of Ivanka, Don Jr and Eric combined in Jonah Hill’s character.
If you looked at the labels on the pods, they showed the names of the corporations the people were from.
I agree. It only works because in many ways reality has overtaken satire.
I don’t think it really matters which current global issue you map it too, because I don’t think the specifics of the threat were the point. The point is how we react to these threats, and the answer is that a lot of people act in deeply counterproductive ways for reasons that are stupid, selfish or both, and that this can result in Very Bad Things happening to humanity.
Yes, but the dust wouldn’t be spread evenly, with some places being perpetually overcast and others being mostly fine.
What was the relative position of the Gulf of Mexico and NZ then?
No, if the dust was hanging in the atmosphere for literally hundreds of years, I don’t think any part of the planet would have been mostly fine. Pop culture tends to really DOWNPLAY just how bad the asteroid impact and its aftermath was.
I somehow missed that he was supposed to be her son. It was only after he was calling out for “Mom” in the final scene that I looked to see if the characters shared a last name.
There was a blink-your-ears-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in their first meeting with the President where the grad student, trying to figure out why this idiot was in the room, said, “I thought you were her son?”, and he blurts out, obviously annoyed, “I’m the Chief of Staff!”
Opposite sides of the world. Which made NZ one of the worst-hit spots. One of the main modeled effects of the impact aren’t dust from the impact, but globs of molten rock thrown on sub-orbital trajectories in all directions, which hit the ground and started global forest fires. Evidence that this happened includes large amounts of ash at the katey boundary, topped by a large spike in fern spores, ferns being one of the first plants to reappear after a major forest fire. Here
This is a movie that shows the spread of wildfires that were generated by the Chicxulub impact event 65 million years ago when large numbers of plants and animals, including dinosaurs, were extinguished. The fires were generated after debris ejected from the crater was lofted far above the Earth’s atmosphere and then rained back down through the atmosphere. Like countless trillions of meteors, the debris heated the atmosphere and surface temperatures so high that vegetation on the ground was ignited. Impact debris racing through the atmosphere was concentrated above the impact site (now Mexico) and the opposite side of the Earth (now the Indian Ocean). The Earth rotated beneath the returning plume of impact ejecta, so that the first migrated to the west. Most of the fires were ignited in the first day after the impact, although material continued to fall back into the atmosphere for another 3 days. This movie is an outcome of a study by David A. Kring and Daniel D. Durda, 2002, Trajectories and distribution of material ejected from the Chicxulub impact crater: Implications for postimpact wildfires, Journal of Geophysical Research 107, 22p.
Is the caption from an animated gif in this article:
Saying that there were non-avian dinosaurs still around a million years after the impact really does amount to a highly extraordinary claim, and the claim (by the researchers, I’m not blaiming you) don’t have the necessary extraordinary evidence.
This is how I took that moment too, but I figured out he was her son at some later point - early enough to enjoy some of the other jokes they made about that.
I remembered reading that the dust blocked light for years-centuries, but reviewing recent studies it looks like current models predict about 2 years of no sun. That’s still plenty to wipe our almost all living trees and plants, of course - anything that grew afterwards would have grown from seeds that survived this hellish period.
I was disappointed. I went in not really knowing much about it, so I don’t think it was a problem of my expectations being too high. There were some funny moments, but overall it was just uncomfortable and depressing. For me at least, satire needs to highlight some absurdity I hadn’t noticed, or capture something I hadn’t been able to adequately describe, to have that satisfying “zing” that makes it worth watching. For the last five years, I’ve been awash in a sea of social media memes riffing on Trump, on the widespread rejection of reality in America, the particular form of sexism that rejects concerns voiced by women as hysteria, and more recently, COVID-related idiocy. Some of those memes have hit that satirical sweet spot for me; most haven’t. Perhaps if this movie were the first satirical treatment I’d ever seen of these concepts, I would’ve enjoyed it more.
I think like a lot of satire, it suffers from trying to take on too many targets, diluting its impact. Not only that, but the skewering of many of those targets was not particularly well done.
Comparisons aren’t fair, but in Dr. Strangelove, they took a perfect kill shot at corporate America with the single line, “You’re gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola company.”
I’m not sure if this has been addressed yet, but I did like that they made Leo’s character flawed, and stray a little in his decision making. A minor point, but helps in making the film look less like it’s got it’s head up it’s ass.
I suspect COVID is the big reason this hasn’t “hit” with a lot of people. As an analogy for climate change, it works, because it highlights the absurdity by exaggerating it.
But COVID denial is already an exaggeration. We’re already rolling our eyes at the people who refuse to see what’s plainly in front of their faces. We actually see people denying the reality of COVID even as they’re in the hospital dying of COVID. Trying to dial that up to 11 doesn’t work, because real life is already at 12.
Yeah, I think he hit it well with the post-cancelling the nuclear strike situation. The people in charge had screwed up the one best chance they had, and he knew it. The best he could do was support their new, risky plan, in hopes it would work, even as he strongly suspected it might fail.
Showing the cognitive burden of hoping for success while fearing failure was well done. What else could he have done at that point?
Exactly this. Good satire is subtle. This is the sort of “satire” that might be written by an average creative writing student. Satire this blatant is only going to be watched by people who already sympathise with the message. I’d call this more a “making fun of” movie. And as a result is was meh.
I’d disagree, because as others said - at this point in our history, subtle satire is hardly satire at all.
If you made a documentary film about Trump and his response to COVID, and showed it in 2012, you’d probably be accused of overly blatant satire that no one could take seriously, too.
“Oh really? The president is going to mimic disabled people and say that if his daughter wasn’t his daughter he’d be all over her? This is ridiculous! And then he’s going to contradict his own scientific experts during a plague and ramble about injecting bleach or shining lights inside people? No one is gonna buy this crap!”