Happy New Years!
Jan. 1st, 2022 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribHappy New Years! I stayed in last night. After cooking myself a large steak I watched the new Netflix film Don't Look Up and part of another Netflix film, The Lost Daughter. I have thoughts on both - herewith in reverse order of screening.
I found The Lost Daughter entirely too slow for my tastes, and didn't really care much for the characters. I gave it up about an hour in, having decided that I was not the target audience for that movie. Having Googled the ending, I think I made the right call.
Don't Look Up was more to my tastes, although given the events of 2020 and 2021 it was a bit on the nose. As revealed in the trailers, Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DeCaprio discover a comet on a collision course with Earth. Meryl Streep, playing a sex-reversed Donald Trump, is President and well, she responds to the comet pretty much as you'd expect. (Spoiler - not well.) Another minor spoiler is the movie's title.
Much like the ongoing COVID-19 plague, some people respond to the comet threat by denying it exists. When the comet becomes visible to the naked eye, concerned people start a campaign to tell people "just look up" and see the comet for themselves. Streep's counter-campaign is, well, "don't look up."
There have been a number of rocks-heading-for-Earth stories in SF. A standard trope in those stories is a group of people opposed to the impact-prevention efforts, usually for religious reasons. I never really bought into that idea. In Don't Look Up, they ripped an unfortunately more believable trope from the headlines, that of willful denial.
I found The Lost Daughter entirely too slow for my tastes, and didn't really care much for the characters. I gave it up about an hour in, having decided that I was not the target audience for that movie. Having Googled the ending, I think I made the right call.
Don't Look Up was more to my tastes, although given the events of 2020 and 2021 it was a bit on the nose. As revealed in the trailers, Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DeCaprio discover a comet on a collision course with Earth. Meryl Streep, playing a sex-reversed Donald Trump, is President and well, she responds to the comet pretty much as you'd expect. (Spoiler - not well.) Another minor spoiler is the movie's title.
Much like the ongoing COVID-19 plague, some people respond to the comet threat by denying it exists. When the comet becomes visible to the naked eye, concerned people start a campaign to tell people "just look up" and see the comet for themselves. Streep's counter-campaign is, well, "don't look up."
There have been a number of rocks-heading-for-Earth stories in SF. A standard trope in those stories is a group of people opposed to the impact-prevention efforts, usually for religious reasons. I never really bought into that idea. In Don't Look Up, they ripped an unfortunately more believable trope from the headlines, that of willful denial.
