MOVIE REVIEW: DON’T LOOK UP! and COSMOS

 

JUST A SHORT NOTE ON a couple of flicks I saw last week. Don’t Look UP! is an excellent film staring Leonardo di Caprio and Jennifer Lawrence. It’s a sci-fi comedy about the end of the world which, for the most part, works. Lawrence and di Caprio star as two university scientists who discover a rogue comet headed toward Earth that is a potential planet killer (spoiler alert—it is a planet killer). Humour is created around the absurd situation wherein the two cannot get anyone to take their discovery seriously—that the earth will be destroyed in a few months. The vapid, modern media landscape, with its twenty-four-hour news cycles, celebrity-obsession and clown-show roster of hot-air-filled talking heads, is thoroughly lampooned by the film’s sharp-edged satire, and while the plot does drag in places and the humour is a bit ‘laid-on’ at times, as a whole, it is well done and worth a look. One reviewer, rather unkindly, proclaimed, “it’s no Strangelove”, referencing the 1964 movie classic by Stanley Kubrick, Doctor Strangelove, Or How…etc., which is a high bar for any movie maker to achieve, particularly with 9/10^ths of the garbage that passes for movies these days. American political commentator, David Sirota, who co-wrote Don't Look Up! says the film is a metaphor for climate change and the seeming inability for our species to do anything significant about stopping it. Instead of a comet and instant annihilation, David reminds us we are faced with a slower-moving calamity, but one that could very well be just as devastating to our world as a meteor strike. Food for thought. So, on the last day of the world, what will you be doing?

 

THE BRIT FILM, Cosmos, another sci-fi, was a bit of a surprise. I’d seen the YouTube advert for it, but I thought it would be a low-budget, cheesy sort of movie snack with green-tentacled aliens and a bunch of screaming millennials. Low-budget it is—the majority of the film takes place in a four-door hatchback—but the script and dialogue were first-rate and the plot was, at times, a surprising nail-biter, with (spoiler-alert) absolutely no blood and guts or deliquescing-goo-squirting alien xenomorphs! 

The story centres around a late-night vigil held by three amateur astronomers as they monitor various celestial objects in the moonless sky above a dark, English countryside. After a slow start (give it time), the three characters tend to grow on you, as the script unpacks their personal histories and relationship to each other. In other words, like all good writing, you become invested in the characters, care for them and want to see what happens. There is quite a bit of technical language as they set up and fine-tune their various instruments, including a small telescope, to observe and record, among other things, the fly-over of a British satellite all three had worked on, designing and constructing, during their day jobs at a local aerospace company. But the technical language, which I understood almost nothing about, actually added to a realistic atmosphere of discovery and suspense, especially after one of the astronomers, Mike Webster, begins to record something out of the ordinary as he listens to radio wave signals coming from outer space. I won’t give away the plot, but I recommend it as a surprisingly entertaining, low-budget sci-fi flick.

So, two movies: One about the end of the world and the other about a potential, new chapter in humanity’s history*.

 

Cheers, Jake. 

       

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* Of course, the gloomier side of me is reminded of another interpretation for Fermi’s famous paradox—which outlines the inevitable conflict between two sentient species occupying the same territory, whereby one species kills off the other because each sees the other as an existential threat. 

QUESTION: What if there were a second species with intelligence comparable to humans on earth? (Some say there are quite a few, already!) For example, say the Neanderthals survived the arrival of Homo Sapiens a couple of hundred thousand years ago, could Homo Sapiens share this world with another such as itself? Or would there be a blood bath?

As for Fermi’ Paradox, another reason why we don't have proof of alien life in the cosmos, according to this interpretation, is because technically superior races, when encountering similarly advanced civilizations, or ones that are potentially so, invariably attack and destroy them, lest the same be done to them. Like a warlord does when he kills off his siblings or murders other rivals to the throne. Just in case.

All in all, it's a rather depressing thought when looking up into the night sky, and one I’d prefer not to believe has any validity. But if my own species is an example of mature sapience, at least so far, I may start rooting for the dolphins.