Don‘t watch this movie by Adam McKay (2020) if you do not like to look into a mirror.
Best bitter fun black satire in a loooong time! Appears to be harmless – but is not. What may get served as another unnecessary doomsday movie – but turning out to write media history of providing a rare mirror in transformational times, within a crisis which is festering for decades and breaking open with Covid-19. A paradigm is dying and we are able to bitterly laugh about it – and therefore about ourselves. Its the best black comedy since „Network“ by Sidney Lumet from 1976 which took a bold shot at television and politics and „The Second Civil War“ a cult media satire from 1997 by Joe Dante aiming the cannons on migration, media & empathy in a globalised world. In analysing and dissecting our times even superior in exposing layers of moronic behaviour and bigottism which we may call normal.
We definitely deserve this kind of Armageddon (1998, Michael Bay) without Bruce Willis, which shoves the truths of our feverish „civilized“ socities glued together by cheap digital appreciation down our smartphone-throats with glee. A movie like the Halley Comet frenzy of the turn of the century (1910 and his return in 1986), only expanded by adding Big tech, Climate Crisis and the Social Network factor without giving into „Iron Sky“ sillyness.
A beacon of hope somehow, that – if this gets greenlighted and produced NOW, a lot of people are angry enough to get it right within these years of Pandemic havoc, before we make the same mistakes again. To digest the storm on the Capitol and NoVax tendecies worldwide with a movie ridden with stars and on a big budget, that is something and perversely soothing – because our dysfunctional imbalance is exactly that self-destructive.
No, this may not mean the world changes because of a movie, but it is a healthy sign that a lot of our storytellers and their peers do not take the shit anymore and stand up like the iconic anchorman Howard Beale in Network and shout:“I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!“ Leonardo di Caprio did this here in his own way… and to render a lot of behaviours „uncool“ may be the fine blade of a cultural accessible counterstrike here forged into 2,5h of streaming pictures.
In a world where accusations or subtle passive-aggressive tactics polarize people, it takes a stance for family and against fucking up our planet, while it triggers the right pain and laughter – highly recommended!
