![]() I hope the next time this opportunity comes up, Hollywood aims for the people piloting the asteroid, and I hope they put effort into ensuring they hit those targets. They’re the decision-makers in the fossil fuel industry, their lobbyists, their marketing firms and their broadly spread political defence squad. But the real villains of the climate crisis aren’t citizens distracted by Ariana Grande and Twitter. The film wastes hours hand-wringing about celebrity culture, algorithms, memes and data privacy. Media misreporting is mostly put down to air-headed morning show fluff, but in reality, journalism’s most deadly failures on climate come down to false balance (which features only briefly), or energised disinformation (there’s no News Corp analogue here, extra weird considering McKay’s EP role on the very funny, Murdoch-inspired Succession). The void left by the fossil industry is filled with strange choices. Similarly, the toxicity of the fossil industry’s impact across both sides of politics would have been a richer, funnier and more accurately reflective approach. Considering the film is touted as holding up a “ devastating mirror”, the absence of the main character of the climate crisis is unforgivable. Weirdly absent from the film is a clear analogue of the fossil fuel industry (Rylance’s techy disaster capitalist wants to exploit the mineral wealth of the comet, but he isn’t piloting the asteroid for profit). ![]() It matters then that in attempting to hold a mirror up to humanity’s response to the climate crisis, it has strange priorities. ![]() It’s a massive hit, widely viewed across the world. Regardless, we have to engage with the deeper flaws of this film. ![]()
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