Maybe I’m wrong because I don’t really follow them, but I don’t think McKay or Sirota believed this movie was saying something new or that it would change the world. From their account of the inspiration for the script, they were just feeling frustrated like everyone else with how unserious the establishment is being about climate change so they made a satire about that feeling of frustration and helplessness. I’m sure they want it to help raise urgency, but I don’t think they have the pretense that the movie is something more important than another piece of propaganda to urge people to act.

But the thing I find weird about the criticism is not that I think the movie is perfect, it’s really that the movie itself seems unimportant and that is like a big theme of the movie. We live in a culture that has hypernormalized the slow walk to the apocalypse, and we keep existing in this surreal hellscape of frivolity and grifting around that fact. It’s like everybody is either in a hypnotic state of coping or they’re just delusional due to helplessness, and it’s because the whole structure of society just can’t abide such a massive existential crisis. It is too inconvenient to the ruling class, so they try to spin it into anything from a good thing, to something that can’t be happening, or to something that we’re just watching on NatGeo as though we are aliens observing our own “natural” death.

So I can see why McKay and Sirota keep seeming to respond to criticism by talking about climate change, which keeps pissing off critics who call it deflection or condescension. Don’t Look Up is just a movie, but it’s a movie ABOUT the actually existing, really happening climate apocalypse and the feeling of helplessness it inspires for average people. Putting emphasis in some article or essay on how it’s boring, or not subtle enough, or not new enough feels insane. We’re in the process of condemning billions of people to death and disaster, in this case the medium of film as mass entertainment is just one of the few means of communicating about it. Its quality as “art” or “entertainment” is the kind of frivolity we are forced by the machinery of hegemonic capitalist culture to bury our heads in to not face the really happening disaster. The absurdity of the fact this is one of our only ways to communicate is in the film. It just feels bizarre that the movie is basically like “isn’t it psychotic that we can’t talk about the end of the world without ‘media training’” and then some big criticism of the movie is that it wasn’t artistic/subtle enough.

But this isn’t to say you have to like the movie, I could see it just being boring to someone. It’s more the group that are spending time criticizing the movie. I dunno, just feels perverse. Like who gives a shit about the movie, if it weren’t for climate change this would just be a parody of disaster movies. The reason people are scared while watching it is because it’s really happening and we all know it.