Molly Taft at Wired might have a point
Because everyone hates actually Doing Something in their own lives about ‘climate change’? That they’re good with government forcing people to Do Something in theory, but not practice?
Should you see a Looney Tunes–esque satire that stars Tom Cruise in prosthetics portraying a loud caricature of an American oilman, that’s currently on track to be one of the biggest box-office failures of all time?
Absolutely yes—and it’s a movie that rewired my expectations of what a movie about climate change should be. Digger, the critically panned, exorbitantly expensive new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, calls into question the purpose of art and even the basic purpose of telling the truth in the face of a capitalist machine churning the world toward climate disaster. The deeply uncomfortable film forces audiences to confront what kind of characters we’re the most comfortable making into climate villains. (snip)
The trailers play up the movie as a too-broad-it’s-painful satire of American oilmen and how a Trumpian-inspired religious-right administration would respond to a real climate disaster. Iñárritu, however, lets us in on the secret early: The farce we’re watching is actually a play within the movie, being performed in a theater with a leaky ceiling that keeps losing power. Tom Cruise is not playing Digger Rockwell, but rather an actor playing Digger Rockwell.
We eventually learn that the play, Fossil Fools, depicts events that actually happened some decades ago. From then on, you’re aware that every joke, every villainous portrayal of Digger and the president as Really Bad Guys, is for two audiences: moviegoers in 2026 and theatergoers living in a dystopian future.
Again, even if it wasn’t about ‘climate change’ I wouldn’t bother, because the trailers do not say what the movie is about and aren’t interesting enough to make me want to see it. It seems bombastic and silly, and, look, even Warmists aren’t interested in getting in their fossil fueled vehicles to go see a movie hating on fossil fuels which used a ton of fossil fuels to make.
Five years after a record number of people watched Don’t Look Up, the Trump administration is back in power and has pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement again. The government is gleefully doubling down on “Drill, Baby, Drill.” Tech corporations that in the Don’t Look Up era were touting their goals to cut emissions and even reverse past damage are now walking those back, thanks to the AI boom—which, they promise, will help solve climate change someday. And here I am, typing on my computer, driving a car around that uses fossil fuels.
So, there was zero point to your cult propaganda.
