This is great. I think it's a great way to explore satire, and particularly how sometimes satire falls a bit flat and other satire is the best media on the planet.
I did kind of like Don't look up but I definitely have a lot of the same criticisms. I wish a lot of the more serious moments didn't happen and I wish all the seriousness was left until the end moments because it would have definitely made it a lot more impactful. And the American exceptionalism was difficult to deal with. Do they really think that no other country would do anything? NATO? The UN? Literally any other country with nuclear force?
Dr. Strangelove had a profound impression on me when I watched it as a teenager in the late 90s. It's not only extremely funny and well-done as a comedy (I always loved black comedy and British humour), but as the laughter died down and I stopped to think about what I was laughing about, it really hit me. How close human civilization got to nuclear self-annihilation (the movie may be satire, but the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the things I was learning about in high school at the time, did happen) and how profoundly stupid and frightening the whole concept of nuclear weapons and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) really is. And that final sequence of the movie with footage of actual nuclear explosions ... Man, I've watched that sequence a hundred times. It scares the bejeezus out of me. There's one take where we can clearly see the nuclear fireball unobscured by clouds -- just a huge free-floating ball of super-heated plasma fueled by nuclear reactions -- and it dawned on me that that is basically a very small, artificial replica of the Sun (technically not far from the truth as it's an H-bomb) ... And that we've reached the point where we can replicate the Sun, and yet we use that amazing power to potentially destroy ourselves. The madness of that just blew my mind back then, and still does. (Asimov's short stories like Silly Asses or Hell-Fire, which I read around that time, certainly helped reinforce that impression.) But anyway, I enjoyed your review. And I fully coincide with your appreciation of the films: Don't Look Up was OK (funny and on point at times, just too long for its own good -- I did love that the world is not saved at the end), while Dr. Strangelove is a masterpiece of satire and black comedy that contains a powerful critique and warning even if that was not Kubrick's explicit intention.
Thank you so much for this video!!! I was rewatching D. Stragelove and I thought how much Don't Look Up drikns the same water of the 1964's Kubrick film!!!
Absolutely brilliant analysis that requires the viewers to answer the title's question themselves. I haven't seen any film criticism this good in a while.
I have to admit, I really liked don't look up and saw it apparently have a fair deal of impact on the thought patterns of the centrists in my life, especially viz. corporate responsibility. For all its flaws, I think it created opportunities to have conversations. Still an excellent video, enjoyed the analysis and I particularly like the comfort the afflicted etc. definition.
Dr. Strangelove is a surrealist satire, just like Iron Sky. Don't Look Up isn't even a satire, it's not _played_ like a satire but played straight, it's just depressing. It's similar to all those 1980s and 1990s disaster movies, except the protagonists fail to i.e. save the world from the asteroid or fail to get to safety while a volcano erupts in L.A., so basically like Emmerich's movie 2012, except 2012 was far more over the top in terms of the disaster. A huge asteroid hitting Earth _isn't_ unrealistic, as it has happened before many times in geological timescales. And honestly, with today's technology, there _is_ nothing we could do with an asteroid that size and that close to Earth already. All those asteroid disaster movies like Armageddon where the entire world comes together to build a spaceship in record time to fly enough H-bombs up to the asteroid to divert its course, and do it early enough to make the course change count, and manage to _not_ blow the asteroid into slightly smaller (and irradiated) chunks that still hit Earth, _and_ most of the heroes makes it back to Earth alive... that is far more unrealistic.
I really enjoyed your analysis and thought about a lot of what you said while watching. The blatant american exceptionalism was very hard to watch. Oh, the USA doesn’t want to do anything? Guess we’ll all die then, without the hero. A lot of the comedic scenes I felt were so removed from the reality they were making fun of that I simply didn’t find them funny. I also thought that the focus on all the obvious trump references was funny in how not self aware it was. Global warming is a centuries old issues, and the whole movie just felt like the american “left” patting itself on the back.
Oh also kinda linked with the american exceptionalism is don't look ups obsession with doing things through the right means. The characters all give up once they can't convince politicians instead of doing any protesting
Art can have a point, it just depends on the way the viewer interprets it - not necessarily on what the artist wanted. But art doesn't have to have a point, it can just be beautiful/interesting/funny/scary/thrilling etc. Satire is a type of art, & I think the answer is a resounding 'No'. I tend to agree with the early point about the political message of 'Don't Look Up' only appealing to those that agreed with its politics in the first place. I think 'Dr Strangelove' might have convinced some people who agreed with nuclear deterrant of the insanity of it all, & maybe actually changed people's minds.
Wheres my refund oreugene. Particularly liked the analysis through Will Self's 'is this sature' tool. It brings into focus some disquiet I have had in about activism in media that can feel insincere. I learned something on the internet today.
one thing I absolutely love about Strangelove is how the sexualy frustration and inability undertones justify the neglect and bad decisions that eventually lead to war. Still as true and relevant as ever - it may be an oversimplification, but I find that every war can be traced down to people's insecurities, both personal as well as social...
Don’t look up is a psychological horror film masquerading as a comedy. It mixes the disconcerting absurdity of Kafka with the humour as horror of Lewis Carroll. In both a protagonist identifies a serious and alarming problem: a lost child, a person wrongly arrested and is met with indifference / absurdity from those they seek help and solidarity from. The ending works because it reveals the seriousness of the reality. It’s not a joke, it’s not funny, it’s horror. For me it’s closer to then ending of Blackadder than it is to Strangelove. The horror is compounded when you realise in real life it won’t all go out in a bang like in the film but instead be a slow agonising collapse.
I was writing a paper about Dr. Strangelove and while I was watching the film for the first time the other day it instantly made me think about don't look up so seeing this made me glad that other people thought the same
You cannot compare these 2 movies. One is legendary. One was kind of entertaining. Don’t Look Up doesn’t work as a metaphor for climate change because the Comet is not man made. It’s a now problem. We are good with those. Long Term problems not so much. Climate change is long term. The Comet 25 days. It also is not clear that nuking the comet was going to work and the weird guys plan was bad. Finally correcting Climate change is a boon for the economy. It costs nothing, the fix is invented yet we do nothing for partisan and religious reasons. I feel like they just should have chosen climate change.
brilliant video!! it made me think a bit further than my initial reaction to don’t look up which was this is awful and i hate it, looking at it with more depth with this video made me think about why that was my reaction and i love it for that :)
I had a similar reaction after watching it but during I felt the last 2 years in microcosm which is impressive, I thought it was overproduced but it achieves an affective override I haven't seen produced so well before
I'd contrast that strangelove setup the failure from the start, once the bomber is up and has it's orders that's that the attempts to avert it are relatively futile. Don't look up focuses on reacting to a crisis where there's no failure to setup
The answer is of course satire does not need to have a point. It would be nice if it was funny. Comedy must have a point and that is “Happy Ever After” in other words a lie. Tragedy must have a point and that is to accurately depict the world and situations which we live.
During the Cuban missile crisis my grandfather had a plan to take the family out to the woods and shoot everyone with a shotgun to spare them the aftermath of nuclear war. People today don’t understand.
Glad that Strangelove was made before the kind of over the top idiocy of Don't Look Up became common place or it'd be full of morons running around screaming about nuclear armageddon while CG graphics super imposed over nuclear explosions rack up a kill count of each mushroom cloud because it'd presume that audiences can't figure out that nukes are bad.
or maybe they just wanted to rip-off another Kubrick movie. as phenomenal and timeless as his movies are, they were ripe to be ripped off. only the best movies are.
Don’t worry your pretty eyes abut it, we have a new film that will be the new film the will give us an ultimate thrill and is playing la I at the moment …. Is uncanny how a young George C Scott looks like Zelensky !
The biggest cause of resurce overexploitation, of which the climate crisis is just one part, is humans overbreeding (defined as any offspring beyond the equilibrium replacement rate of 2 surviving children per couple per lifetime, and no, marrying a second time doesn't count). China and India both have over 1 billion population each, together making up two thirds of global overpopulation of 8+ billion humans (which is untenable, so even _keeping_ that number, which we won't, is already too much). So yes, as an ecologist, please don't give me the pearl clutching "oh noes the poor third world countries" (which neither China nor India are n matter how much they tried to falsely claim that while they send rockets into space and have giant factories and world class geneticists).
wait a sec! are you really gonna compare Dont look up with Dr. Strangelove? You gotta be shiiting- I mean DLU is an ok one time movie yeah, whatever , with some pors and cons, but no, you are not gonna put a fucking masterpiece in the same category. Its not even the same .. idk.. division.. damn.. Lets see what you even dare to compare here....
This is great. I think it's a great way to explore satire, and particularly how sometimes satire falls a bit flat and other satire is the best media on the planet.
I did kind of like Don't look up but I definitely have a lot of the same criticisms. I wish a lot of the more serious moments didn't happen and I wish all the seriousness was left until the end moments because it would have definitely made it a lot more impactful. And the American exceptionalism was difficult to deal with. Do they really think that no other country would do anything? NATO? The UN? Literally any other country with nuclear force?
Dr. Strangelove had a profound impression on me when I watched it as a teenager in the late 90s.
It's not only extremely funny and well-done as a comedy (I always loved black comedy and British humour), but as the laughter died down and I stopped to think about what I was laughing about, it really hit me. How close human civilization got to nuclear self-annihilation (the movie may be satire, but the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of the things I was learning about in high school at the time, did happen) and how profoundly stupid and frightening the whole concept of nuclear weapons and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) really is.
And that final sequence of the movie with footage of actual nuclear explosions ... Man, I've watched that sequence a hundred times. It scares the bejeezus out of me. There's one take where we can clearly see the nuclear fireball unobscured by clouds -- just a huge free-floating ball of super-heated plasma fueled by nuclear reactions -- and it dawned on me that that is basically a very small, artificial replica of the Sun (technically not far from the truth as it's an H-bomb) ... And that we've reached the point where we can replicate the Sun, and yet we use that amazing power to potentially destroy ourselves. The madness of that just blew my mind back then, and still does. (Asimov's short stories like Silly Asses or Hell-Fire, which I read around that time, certainly helped reinforce that impression.)
But anyway, I enjoyed your review. And I fully coincide with your appreciation of the films: Don't Look Up was OK (funny and on point at times, just too long for its own good -- I did love that the world is not saved at the end), while Dr. Strangelove is a masterpiece of satire and black comedy that contains a powerful critique and warning even if that was not Kubrick's explicit intention.
Thank you so much for this video!!! I was rewatching D. Stragelove and I thought how much Don't Look Up drikns the same water of the 1964's Kubrick film!!!
Absolutely brilliant analysis that requires the viewers to answer the title's question themselves. I haven't seen any film criticism this good in a while.
Good video, I like your more recent ones with you on camera
Good video essay. I like that comparison to Strangelove and Don't Look Up and how much better Don't Look Up could've been. Subbed
True true
I have to admit, I really liked don't look up and saw it apparently have a fair deal of impact on the thought patterns of the centrists in my life, especially viz. corporate responsibility. For all its flaws, I think it created opportunities to have conversations. Still an excellent video, enjoyed the analysis and I particularly like the comfort the afflicted etc. definition.
Dr. Strangelove is a surrealist satire, just like Iron Sky.
Don't Look Up isn't even a satire, it's not _played_ like a satire but played straight, it's just depressing. It's similar to all those 1980s and 1990s disaster movies, except the protagonists fail to i.e. save the world from the asteroid or fail to get to safety while a volcano erupts in L.A., so basically like Emmerich's movie 2012, except 2012 was far more over the top in terms of the disaster. A huge asteroid hitting Earth _isn't_ unrealistic, as it has happened before many times in geological timescales. And honestly, with today's technology, there _is_ nothing we could do with an asteroid that size and that close to Earth already.
All those asteroid disaster movies like Armageddon where the entire world comes together to build a spaceship in record time to fly enough H-bombs up to the asteroid to divert its course, and do it early enough to make the course change count, and manage to _not_ blow the asteroid into slightly smaller (and irradiated) chunks that still hit Earth, _and_ most of the heroes makes it back to Earth alive... that is far more unrealistic.
I really enjoyed your analysis and thought about a lot of what you said while watching.
The blatant american exceptionalism was very hard to watch. Oh, the USA doesn’t want to do anything? Guess we’ll all die then, without the hero.
A lot of the comedic scenes I felt were so removed from the reality they were making fun of that I simply didn’t find them funny.
I also thought that the focus on all the obvious trump references was funny in how not self aware it was. Global warming is a centuries old issues, and the whole movie just felt like the american “left” patting itself on the back.
Oh also kinda linked with the american exceptionalism is don't look ups obsession with doing things through the right means. The characters all give up once they can't convince politicians instead of doing any protesting
ooooh this, thank you. I always felt don't look up felt weird but couldn't really explain why and this perfectly sums it up.
u are seriously brilliant thank you so much for producing and sharing your thoughts? i really love ur stuff :)
Art can have a point, it just depends on the way the viewer interprets it - not necessarily on what the artist wanted. But art doesn't have to have a point, it can just be beautiful/interesting/funny/scary/thrilling etc. Satire is a type of art, & I think the answer is a resounding 'No'.
I tend to agree with the early point about the political message of 'Don't Look Up' only appealing to those that agreed with its politics in the first place. I think 'Dr Strangelove' might have convinced some people who agreed with nuclear deterrant of the insanity of it all, & maybe actually changed people's minds.
Wheres my refund oreugene.
Particularly liked the analysis through Will Self's 'is this sature' tool. It brings into focus some disquiet I have had in about activism in media that can feel insincere.
I learned something on the internet today.
I’m glad that you enjoyed this video mr sterling, please let me see my family again
one thing I absolutely love about Strangelove is how the sexualy frustration and inability undertones justify the neglect and bad decisions that eventually lead to war. Still as true and relevant as ever - it may be an oversimplification, but I find that every war can be traced down to people's insecurities, both personal as well as social...
Don’t look up is a psychological horror film masquerading as a comedy.
It mixes the disconcerting absurdity of Kafka with the humour as horror of Lewis Carroll.
In both a protagonist identifies a serious and alarming problem: a lost child, a person wrongly arrested and is met with indifference / absurdity from those they seek help and solidarity from.
The ending works because it reveals the seriousness of the reality. It’s not a joke, it’s not funny, it’s horror. For me it’s closer to then ending of Blackadder than it is to Strangelove. The horror is compounded when you realise in real life it won’t all go out in a bang like in the film but instead be a slow agonising collapse.
Really enjoyed this essay and your other work btw, you’re very funny and insightful, please make more!
Royalty free drum rolls are the best way to give us a rug-pull xo
Great vid!!! Love the contrast in these films :)
I was writing a paper about Dr. Strangelove and while I was watching the film for the first time the other day it instantly made me think about don't look up so seeing this made me glad that other people thought the same
You cannot compare these 2 movies. One is legendary. One was kind of entertaining. Don’t Look Up doesn’t work as a metaphor for climate change because the Comet is not man made. It’s a now problem. We are good with those. Long Term problems not so much. Climate change is long term. The Comet 25 days. It also is not clear that nuking the comet was going to work and the weird guys plan was bad. Finally correcting Climate change is a boon for the economy. It costs nothing, the fix is invented yet we do nothing for partisan and religious reasons. I feel like they just should have chosen climate change.
brilliant video!! it made me think a bit further than my initial reaction to don’t look up which was this is awful and i hate it, looking at it with more depth with this video made me think about why that was my reaction and i love it for that :)
I had a similar reaction after watching it but during I felt the last 2 years in microcosm which is impressive, I thought it was overproduced but it achieves an affective override I haven't seen produced so well before
I blame my precious bodily fluids.😂
I'd contrast that strangelove setup the failure from the start, once the bomber is up and has it's orders that's that the attempts to avert it are relatively futile. Don't look up focuses on reacting to a crisis where there's no failure to setup
You know, my first impression of your title was that I was supposed to not look up something called "vs. Dr. Strangelove."
Dr. Strangelove is brilliant satire. Don't Look Up is dollar store satire.
It's not quite fair. Dr. Strangelove might be one of the best movies ever made.
The answer is of course satire does not need to have a point. It would be nice if it was funny. Comedy must have a point and that is “Happy Ever After” in other words a lie. Tragedy must have a point and that is to accurately depict the world and situations which we live.
During the Cuban missile crisis my grandfather had a plan to take the family out to the woods and shoot everyone with a shotgun to spare them the aftermath of nuclear war. People today don’t understand.
Great compare and contrast, I lost my shit at around the 17:40 mark. Keep it up mate.
"I think a film matters as much as you think it does."
GET OUT OF MY HEAD YOU FILTHY TELEPATH
Glad that Strangelove was made before the kind of over the top idiocy of Don't Look Up became common place or it'd be full of morons running around screaming about nuclear armageddon while CG graphics super imposed over nuclear explosions rack up a kill count of each mushroom cloud because it'd presume that audiences can't figure out that nukes are bad.
Creative, unique! -----Like it so much!! Boost your stats - Promo-SM !!!
or maybe they just wanted to rip-off another Kubrick movie. as phenomenal and timeless as his movies are, they were ripe to be ripped off. only the best movies are.
Don’t worry your pretty eyes abut it, we have a new film that will be the new film the will give us an ultimate thrill and is playing la I at the moment …. Is uncanny how a young George C Scott looks like Zelensky !
The biggest cause of resurce overexploitation, of which the climate crisis is just one part, is humans overbreeding (defined as any offspring beyond the equilibrium replacement rate of 2 surviving children per couple per lifetime, and no, marrying a second time doesn't count). China and India both have over 1 billion population each, together making up two thirds of global overpopulation of 8+ billion humans (which is untenable, so even _keeping_ that number, which we won't, is already too much). So yes, as an ecologist, please don't give me the pearl clutching "oh noes the poor third world countries" (which neither China nor India are n matter how much they tried to falsely claim that while they send rockets into space and have giant factories and world class geneticists).
LOL
wait a sec! are you really gonna compare Dont look up with Dr. Strangelove? You gotta be shiiting- I mean DLU is an ok one time movie yeah, whatever , with some pors and cons, but no, you are not gonna put a fucking masterpiece in the same category. Its not even the same .. idk.. division.. damn.. Lets see what you even dare to compare here....
You can't compare the climate 'crisis' with nuclear war.
That's pure scientific illiteracy.