Don’t Look Up [Media Notes 65a]

Don’t Look Up, as you’ve probably heard, is a weird apocalyptic comedy in which a large comet acts as an allegorical stand-in for climate change. The human race does not come out well.

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times ran a review on the downside of so-so. Nick Allen at Roger Ebert.com was scathing. In a short notice Tyler Cowen noted:

You won’t find many accurate reviews of this one, in part because it is so brutal about media, not to mention American politics. The core message, however, is that everything is downstream of culture. And that we are incapable of taking our own decline seriously.

Cowen cites a substantial review from Bruno Maçães.

I note that Silicon Valley billionaires don't come out very well. Mark Rylance plays a data-happy space-struck billionaire with the power to bend the nation’s response to the comet to his commercial will – though, come to think of it, it’s all about commerce in one way or another. But he does correctly predict the President's demise between the jaws of a Bronteroc.

I rather liked it. It rang true. By all means, see and judge it for yourself.