Progressives will like it, while conservatives will hate it. Not much middle ground, and the average of the reviews tend to be in the middle.

I thought it was a great movie!

Writing positive reviews for every right leaning piece or media and frothing-at-the-mouth negative reviews for any they view as leftist. Personally, I liked it - A LOT.

I liked it. 🙂

Has a climate denier on staff - so I take that one with a grain of salt. Me? I loved it. So did my husband.

For ONCE - in a disaster movie - Superman didn't fly around the earth turning back time.

By the level of negativity and near-invective when I checked reviews after watching. I went into it wholly unprepared and with no expectations, and that probably sets me apart from most of those paid by the review, who seemed at least resentful that their over-the-top expectations for intricate Matrix-like plot twists and innuendoes were not fulfilled.

As for me, I came to realize that four years of watching the yam gleefully metastasize in plain sight made much of the movie seem like a nightmare suddenly inhabited by friends and relatives and difficult to watch too closely. There were good guffaws along the way, though. And I hope I can find the closing Eden scene and flip the script by reinvesting it with the original yam cast.

As an aside, huge kudos to you for your self-awareness as to your movie- and sports-watching difficulties and to both you and your husband for your amiable resulting life adjustments. The definition of a partnership!

a lack of self reflection is prolly the core of being a "conservative" so, yeah, like garlic to dracula.

...I almost always disagree with them.

Last edited Tue Dec 28, 2021, 03:10 AM - Edit history (1)

Not sure were you're seeing negative reviews but IMDB is fairly accurate from what I've seen and the film is 7.3 out of 10 there. I usually consider any show getting above 7 to be well worth watching.

It was heavy-handed. But it's the kind of satire that whacks you upside the head because it has to. The message was basically that as a society we are too superficial, self-absorbed and selfish to recognize, let alone do something about, any crisis that confronts us. It wasn't really about specific disaster like climate change or covid, but how we confront them, or not. It stepped on a lot of toes, not just Trumpist disaster-deniers; it came down very hard on bubble-headed media and pop culture types who are interested only in entertainment and social media attention. If you're looking for subtlety you won't find it in this movie, which is both funny and dark. Watch all the way to the very end of the credits, after the logo and the screen goes black. There's a bleakly hilarious little final scene.

Hard to believe he wrote it before the pandemic seeing how on-point he was.

because he's not even mentioned in Wikipedia's article describing the production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up_(2021_film) I'm not a Sirota fan either but whatever work he did on this film, if any, seems to be so inconsequential that it wasn't mentioned. So don't cheat yourself out of a good movie just because you hate some guy who might or might not have had something minor to do with its production.

As well as a "co-producer" credit.

Besides, sharing the story credit with McCay and getting a co-producer credit may just be bones they threw Sirota.

Doc Severenson got a writing credit on Mac David's song "Stop and Smell the Roses" because Doc suggested the TITLE. Credits in Hollywood are an equally weird game. When they were making The Buddy Holly Story with Gary Busey, they ran out of money. An acquaintance of mine, a trust fund baby and venture capitalist, provided just enough money for them to finish, but he finagled a "CoExecutive Producer" credit out of it. It took him forever to get his investment back though, because Hollywood has an accounting method called "rolling break even".

Anyway, I think McCay did a masterful job. The supporting roles were meaty enough that he got some heavy hitters interested even though the film was lower than average by Hollywood standards ($75 M). He probably got his people to call Meryl Streep's people and said "Do you want to play a conservative POTUS for 2 weeks?". She read the script and said HELL YES! Out of 138 minutes of the film, she was only on the screen for 35 minutes. Leo and Jennifer were on for 86 and 77 minutes respectively.

Seriously? Fits the parody of our bizarre culture perfectly.

My first thought on watching it was....maybe we deserve to become extinct and the dinosaurs are the ones who got screwed.

And we all really enjoyed it. It was a good representation of how America has become dumbed down. And we ignored that our planet is in trouble not from a comet but the earth warming so quickly.

satire with comic dialogue

Was the almost blink and you miss it scene with DiCaprio arguing with people on the internet

DiCaprio’s line, “We really did have everything, didn’t we” will stay with me a long time. Also, Mark Rylance’s portrayal of the billionaire tech jerk was masterful.

They hit so many nails with it. For humor, the General who sold them free snacks and Diabilsky's obsession with it was hilarious. I will watch it again because I am going to "suggest" friends see it too.

Ben H. Winters has written a trilogy about a comet that is also going to wipe out most life on Earth once it hits. It's The Last Policeman trilogy. The comet will hit in about 6 months at the beginning of the first book. The last policeman is a man who sees no point in not doing his job down to the last minute, even though many, many people are just abandoning their jobs, doing whatever the hell they want in the short time remaining. It's really, really good and I highly recommend it.

Lost had me reading and rereading a lot of stuff. Great book.

great about it.

I can't think of one single fucked up thing about our culture they didn't touch on.

I did not find anything funny about it.

here loved it! Want my grandchildren to definitely see it. Hard to believe they actually made a funny doomsday movie. A Dr Strangelove for a new generation. Recommended.

Human beings do better when they face and deal with reality.

Spoiler Alert!

On some other DU thread discussing this movie, comments were made about the need for 5000 or so survivors in order to make a sustainable re-population effort. But, note the median age of all the people wandering out of the pods.

The fact that they all seemed well above reproductive age is an indictment by the story tellers of all the powerful older--hell, let's just call them aged--politicos who are passing legislation that either favors their immediate interests and/or ignores the needs of the people who will be living in a future shaped by the policies they establish.

In the movie, time, money and resources were lavished on a project to ensure the survival of a bunch of people who might not have lived more than a decade and a half longer under normal circumstances. No real effort was made to save a planet filled with young people looking to experience all the normal joys and sorrows that their elders knew in their time. That is exactly what Greta and her age-mates are trying to tell us.

Another minor thought that came to me was after Merle Streep's character calmly walked up to a seemingly harmless creature with an attitude of mild curiosity. What happened was sort of like the opposite of what happened when European explorers encountered the dodo. Sometimes, a little fear and suspicion is a good thing.

all the powerful older--hell, let's just call them aged--politicos who are passing legislation that either favors their immediate interests and/or ignores the needs of the people who will be living in a future shaped by the policies they establish."

Spot on.

And Meryl Streep's body double has a tramp stamp (lower back tattoo) - LOL.

. . . But I thought that I read, (and I could be wrong) that Streep had actually done a nude scene.

Re: My original point about privileging the older but powerful over the young who can both contribute to the gene pool and who will have to live (or die) in a future made by the old and powerful--the one character in that scene whom we know had a child managed to forget about rescuing her child.

I think that was a deliberate story-telling choice. It was a way to hammer home the point that the only protective instincts at work in the minds of our current older politicos are the instincts to preserve their lives, personal comforts and bank accounts. They really don't care what sort of a world future generations will have to face.

Hell, even I tend to seek cold comfort in the knowledge that I will be dead before some of the worst shit hits the fan vis a vis the coming environmental show-down. I don't think such thoughts because I don't care. It's because my mental health is so fragile at times that the only way I can get through the day is to remind myself that I won't be here to see some of the crap to come.

Frankly, I don't know how thoughtful, aware people young people like Greta Thunberg hang on to any shred of sanity. Anybody who tells her to "lighten up and enjoy life" and "go back to school" so she can prepare for the future is an utter asshole.

But Leonardo DiCaprio wasn't! He begged the director to use a body double because he couldn't handle the thought of seeing someone he admired so much in the buff. So at the beginning of the scene, they blurred out her breasts, then used a body double for the bare bottom.

I also noticed that most of the "refugees" were older and white, and I agree, I think it was a deliberate choice.

Man oh man. What a film! I wish I had dragged my butt to the theater to see it.

"Just desserts" - eating - NOM NOM NOM!!!