Movies are important aspect of the culture
I mean they did.
Don't Look Up was huge. It had an all-star, ensemble cast and was one of the biggest releases of 2021.
How many times do you expect them to best the drum?
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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The Day After Tomorrow had a dude that was basically a stand-in for Dick Cheney so Dennis Quaid could tell him that he should have done more sooner.
Waterworld, earth covered in water after the ice caps melted.
Geostorm took for granted that we needed a global network of satellites to battle climate change.
And who can forget The Happening or Birdemic?
Oh, you wanted good movies? (tho I lowkey love Geostorm)
Many people forget that the reason everybody is trying to find a new planet in interstellar, is because climate change made theirs unhabitable.
Also the inciting incident to the 'verse of Firefly:
Mal: "Here's how it is: (The) Earth got used up, so we (moved out, and) terraformed a whole new galaxy of Earths, some rich and flush with new technologies, some not so much. (The) Central Planets, them as formed the Alliance, waged war to bring everyone under their rule; a few idiots tried to fight it, among them myself. I'm Malcolm Reynolds, captain of Serenity.
Was it explicitly climate change? I thought it was “blight” or whatever fictional disease killing crops.
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Don't forget wall-e
I thought Tomorrowland was good. Not great. But good enough.
I actually really liked the premise behind that one, the idea that collectively since we flooded our entertainment with cynical grimdark media, we all just accepted that ill use of technology leading to an apocalypse was an inevitability, and apathy let it happen.
It was an interesting message that I would've liked to see in a different vehicle.
Not even a mention of Happy Feet. C'mon. Lol
This is a great though, and if anything, yeah, "pollution apocalypse" has become such a common trope at this point it's almost lazy writing now.
Pretty much, the problem is Hollywood can only choose between "Make a good movie" or "Have a good message", when "Make an entertaining movie that deliver the message without being overly preachy" was always an option, gaming does it all the time. (Which is probably why Video Game Movies are such big money makers now)
PS: Waterworld is sadly the best movie you've listed here, TDAT is the second best.
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Not to mention the entire series of “Scorcher” movies, starring the famous Tugg Speedman.
If anything they beat the drum too much, I didn't see "Don't Look Up", because of Trump Fatigue. Like so much media from 2015-2020 that got made had one note, and that note was "Orange Man Bad", and I'm like "I know, I couldn't be more aware that orange man bad. I did everything I could to stop it, but Americans are idiots."
It's like.. I get it everything is fucked. You can stop blasting the despair in my face any second now.
Like I'm actually glad Hazbin Hotel got delayed for so long, because I just know Adam was basically just "Donald Trump with a harp and a halo" in an earlier draft, there's no way in literal Hell he wasn't.
Learned a new term the other day, The Doomscroll Industrial Complex
Solid read. Thanks
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And the message went completely over the heads of the people it needed to reach.
the message went completely over the heads of the people it needed to reach
You had a series of very cynical and deliberately manipulative media coverage of the film which tried to spin it as anything but a climate change movie. And then you had a bunch of "man on the street" pieces intended to make viewers appear stupid.
But the core theory of media influenced economic change is rooted in the idea that a movie can shift people from their profit motives. No oil executive is going to watch a slapstick comedy and decide to shift his business's core financial model because of a few jokes. No bank executives are going to divest from carbon emitting industries because some Hollywood starlets made fun of them. No senior member of political leadership is going to change how mining permits and environmental regulations are written because Adam McKay posted big numbers at the box office.
The Network didn't change how Americans consumed their news media. Soylent Green didn't cause Americans to reconsider our policies on factory farming. Jarhead didn't cause any military personal to exit Iraq or Afghanistan. The only movie that seems to have really moved the dial on public policy is Idiocracy, the inspiration behind Elon Musk and Peter Thiel's quest to get more IT people to fuck.
My brother-in-law explicitly thought that the movie was commentary on "the liberal media."
There was definitely commentary on the media in the movie, and society at large, and corporations, and politicians. But the core message of the movie was not just their willingness to let disaster happen in exchange for wealth and power, but also their willingness to lie and manipulate the population for their own selfish gain.
The only movie that seems to have really moved the dial on public policy is Idiocracy, the inspiration behind Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s quest to get more IT people to fuck.
And even then I have to remind people that saying "Idiocracy is a documentary!" that they're being too optimistic.
We are NOT in a fully-automated sex-positive polygamous future with leadership that acknowledges society's problems and places its best and brightest towards a solution, one where free speech is so alive you can even name your restaurant "Buttfuckers" and no one's even slightly offended, one where even the least educated people in our society can get good quality high-paying jobs in everything from the arts to medical, one where sex work is no longer demonized and is considered so valid a profession that you can get your ass rimmed at Starbucks while waiting for your coffee.
And I don't understand why people think we have it anywhere near that good.
We are NOT in a fully-automated sex-positive polygamous future with leadership that acknowledges society’s problems and places its best and brightest towards a solution
In fairness, neither were they. A bunch of the "automated" aspects of society were simply systems nobody knew how to operate that were left on autopilot. The administrators rose through the ranks by being Yes-Men and insisting broken systems were operating as intended. Spraying your crops with gatorade is only an "automation" in the most literal sense. It isn't how a "fully-automated" society is intended to operate.
Further, the whole jail system plus subsequent courtroom drama illustrated the dogmatic resistance to change and zero-tolerance for risks inherent in any change, resulting in a highly sclerotic society. It was only able to change when faced with a sudden catastrophic food crisis.
one where free speech is so alive you can even name your restaurant “Buttfuckers” and no one’s even slightly offended, one where even the least educated people in our society can get good quality high-paying jobs in everything from the arts to medical, one where sex work is no longer demonized and is considered so valid a profession that you can get your ass rimmed at Starbucks while waiting for your coffee.
Hyper-commoditization and exploitation of labor isn't liberation, its slavery. What you're describing is a cultural shift, not a relaxation of bigotry (which - again, referencing the courtroom scene - was in full abundance) or absence of elitism (characters regularly derided one another's intelligence while deferring to the violence of authority figures) or a flattening of incomes (the intro scenes of the future were full of poverty, kept in check by a murderous police force).
And I don’t understand why people think we have it anywhere near that good.
The show was a cartoonish reflection of modern day. It wasn't intended to suggest we have it better or worse, but to parody how things were in the present.
Even the depiction of the present illustrated huge social failures - institutional corruption, political inertia, misappropriation of resources, the false choice between careerism and hedonism - that metastasized over the intervening era into comically exaggerated state.
But people fixate on the first five minutes. And they really fixate on the idea of eugenics implicit in those first five minutes. This is precisely because the same set of smug, elitist, know-nothing oligarchs reflected in the movie are consuming it and taking away the most backwards and regressive messages.
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Pretty much, see the endless amount of idiots who unironically see themselves as the antagonist and think it's a good thing.
(Trump's kids unfavorably comparing the Left to the Resistance in the newer Star Wars films which very blatantly had the First Order be a stand-in for America's Alt Right and Kylo Ren a warning about toxic masculinity, now that's something I'll never forget)
The people it needs to reach are world leaders, and that's just not going to happen. World leaders aren't blind to the problem, they're just fine with burning the earth for money.
Ellen DeGeneres saw Trump watching Finding Dory and tried to explain that the movie was about how it was wrong to separate families.
Trump loved it and had a viewing party at the White House.
ICE illegally separated families at the border, kicked parents back to Mexico, and adopted the kids into white families.... And those were the lucky ones, the unlucky ones died in a concentration camp composed solely of children where the teenagers were expected to take care of the kids who were in turn expected to take care of the toddlers.
Trump and his wife Melania showed up with the latter literally wearing a shirt that read "I don't really care, do you?"
You cannot appeal to the conscience of someone who doesn't have one, no matter how good your movie is or what it's about.
How many times do you expect them to best the drum?
*gestures at all the recycled crap hollywood puts out.
That movie is so amazing
That movie was so difficult to watch
It physically hurt to watch.
I really like the first half of the movie. That feeling of outrage as they try to get attention is just so well done. But the second half just gets too painful. I can’t watch it
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It probably needs a movie where red cap wearing idiots are made angry and Farquaated repeatedly in increasingly ludicrous ways before any sinks in.
Yes, because we haven't been calling them fools for years, maybe we should try it! Maybe it'll work and not just drive them further and further away from sanity out of spite!
We've also been trying to explain facts but that's even less effective.
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This guy gets it.
Demonizing the south as inbred yokels who can't read doesn't get them to listen to you, it just reinforces their xenophobic ideas about how the Liberal Elite are mocking them.
Source: Am Southern Leftist.
I guess I should just be nice to people who want me dead.
Yesn't
You gotta take a "Do no harm, but take no shit." attitude and walk a fine line: Speak softly, carry a big stick.
Naa, they can get fucked. I'm not gonna try to smooth talk them. Have some self-respect.
I used to, but I found making the world my enemy and acting accordingly only leaves people acting with ignorance rather than malice thinking they were right about people like me.
Keep in mind, I speak of kindness only to people who don't know better, not people who definitely do and are just basically fucking Nazis
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Maybe some climate change disaster movies are a good idea to make actually
Plus, disaster movies are fun
What was that one where the world was destroyed by climate change, but instead of burning everything froze? IIRC, the main character was played by John Cusack.
The Day After Tomorrow? I loved that one
Who can forget the scene where they literally ran away from cold.
What a movie
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The one with John Cusack was 2012. California was destroyed by super earthquakes in that one.
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I'm trying to get it, and it isn't working, and I'm thinking maybe it's not me.
The author appears to erroneously think that regular people who watch movies are most responsible for climate change, as opposed to corporations.
Road Warrior
The Road
Telling myself that this is metaphorical and not some boomer taken in by the AI images of the Hollywood sign burning to keep myself from going on an unhinged rant about the exact location of Hollywood, the Hollywood sign, and the fires.
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