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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Daily Beast reports that George Clooney has done the green thing – starred in a new big budget Summer eco-disaster film, which aims to make us feel bad about warm weather.
According to The Daily Beast;
… When was the last time Transformers made you think about your carbon footprint?
Cinematic ambition has long defined the summer movie season. That typically refers to how many different, new, and spectacular ways studios can blow up things, transport us to other dimensions, and delight us with whizbangs and kabooms.
Tomorrowland, as visually stunning of a blockbuster as we’ve ever seen, certainly boasts all that technical ambition. But what sets it apart from what we’re used to is a little bit of moral aspiration, too.
…
The ideas of Tomorrowland, if occasionally heavy-handed, are admirably resonant. How do you wake people up out of their somnambulant compliance and get them not just optimistic about the future, but engaged in charting the direction of it?
In fact, a lot of the scoffing at the film’s Big Idea ambition speaks to the jadedness and state of culture that Tomorrowland actually seeks to expose and confront. Given the rolled-eye reaction to a lot of it, perhaps the challenge is greater than even the film estimates. …
I’m an unashamed Clooney fan – movies like Three Kings, Gravity, Syriana, Clooney has starred in a lot of interesting, thought provoking movies. OK, some of the science was a bit wonky in Gravity, but it was still in my opinion a very watchable movie. The fact someone who normally demonstrates good taste, with his choice of which movie roles he accepts, has gotten mixed up in what looks like a heavy handed, preachy global warming flick – what a shame.
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I used to like George (hasn’t got a) Clooney.
Wall E , Part Deux? Disney polishes gems and turds alike, but you’d think they’d notice the smell from what they’re polishing at least once in awhile. That, and they are institutionally tone deaf when it comes to “the environment.” Or willing propagandists. They are also extremist in propagandizing against DDT, entirely heedless of the facts that it had nothing to do with the bald eagle’s demise or resurgence while the banning of DDT had everything to do with the avoidable deaths of tens of millions of people.
I vote for O Brother and Gravity. Both unreal odysseys that illustrate our own unreal odysseys of reality. I am still taken by the image of weightless tears (in IMAX).
I refuse to give another dollar to the Rodent Empire. Well, maybe I can’t resist a Marvel movie, but Star Wars and Star Trek seem to be ruined now. JJ is now in it for the money, not good film making.
Was JJ ever in it for good film making?
Too soon to tell about Star Wars, but the damage he did to Star Trek was the only thing epic.
You can burn the Cannon, but you cannot remake it. It is a contradiction in terms.
I liked how JJ took a big chance with Cloverfield. I liked it. And he rescued the Mission Impossible franchise. Not my favorite kind of movie, but he was better than the previous two directors. He’s not trying to be Kurosawa or Fellini. But absolutely, yes, the damage to Star Trek is huge. I won’t bother with the Star Wars sewage coming to a theatre near us, shortly. And I forgot to mention my utter disgust with Pixar now. What a major disappointment it has been. Yes, the Rodent Empire sucks the life out of these properties and then discards them. It’s more than sad. They are destroying some of our important works, things that made us proud to be American. Remember what they did with Pearl Harbor? Shameful.
I don’t pay money for preachy. This is the Internet age where the old channels of preaching do not work, like Dan Rather. Wake up George.
No Clooney has entered my house since Solaris. But when hang out with all the free copies of inconvenient truth, birds have stayed clear of the cherries.
I saw it. I saw it because I loved the art and architecture of Tomorrowland in the Disney theme parks, and because when I was young, there were two futures: the good one where everything was wonderful and the bad one where they pushed The Button. It was not cinema, but it was a good Disney live-action cartoon with an admirable message.
Yes, the plot device was that world was going to end. At no point did it specify what the cause or means was, and in fact it was a plot point that the exact means was a complete unknown. For the purpose of what happened to the main characters, the “what” and “how” was not even relevant and the “why” was underlain by the philosophy that things tend to live up to, or down to, your expectations so set them high.
If the author of this post or any fellow commenters see the movie as advancing an AGW perspective, they are both projecting their own obsessions into the space (intentionally) left in the plot and engaging in the sort of closed-minded prejudgement that does not befit a skeptic worthy of any admiration.
If you want to dislike the movie, do it because of the mediocre script and the heavy-handedness of getting the message across. Me, I’d like more of the space age we were promised in my youth and less of the cynical crap I’m greeted by today.
Did you look at what was on the monitors in his house? Half of them were the “extreme weather” meme from CAGW, with the other half being scenes from nuclear Armageddon fantasies out of the 60s. They kept going back to that iceberg calving scene to imply arctic warming, showing it at least 3 times in the film, then their first genius search focused on a bird chopper field and one of the bird chopper engineers as their first genius. The CAGW was there, you simply chose not to see it. (They did undermine it with the plot device of how it was happening but they still made sure the imagery was there to push their theme.) Propaganda is best done as a subtle art, of course the propaganda needed a far better vehicle as this was dross on the lowest of levels.
It also had all the poor production standards going for it as icing on the cake.
“…someone who normally demonstrates good taste…”,
Eric, I’m not coming the raw prawn cobber, but are you talking about the same Goorge Clooney whose absurd academy award acceptance speach in 2006 (for best supporting actor in the insufferable ‘Syriana’) implied that Hollywood was responsible for some of the greatest social upheavals evah and was parodied in the South Park episode ‘Smug Alert!’?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smug_Alert!
…That is the epsiode of Southpark which ended with the smug clouds over Southpark (now full of smug owners of ‘Pious’ and ‘Hindsite’ hybrid cars) and the smug storm brewing over San Francisco (where progressives are so smug they sniff their own farts while their children take LSD to cope with the embarassment) combine with the smug cell produced by George Cloony’s acceptance speach to create the perfect storm of self-satisfaction, resulting in San Francisco disappearing completely up its own arsehole…
The pure CACCA movie would be Fantasyland. Crossed with Pirates of the IPCC.
Pam and Janice,
Could you please get a room?
Thanks.
Late to the party here but, in defense of George, he did star in the awesome diatribe against manufactured stupid people that was “Burn After Reading”.
He’s the one, not shown in this, the best clip, on the plane to Venezuela:
Eric Worrall “The Daily Beast reports that George Clooney has done the green thing – starred in a new big budget Summer eco-disaster film…”
I could not put my finger on what was so repellent about the trailer to that film. It appeared to me to possibly be a sneaky underhanded Hollywood portrayal of smart cities, complete with idyllic fields of gold surrounding them. I guess I will never know.
But I will say WUWT was incorrect about Godzilla! (: That was a terrific movie. The graphs showing the weird onsets of the earthquakes were definitely not climate induced. Loved it.
Maybe if anyone just has to see another movie he can see the insufferable Boomer, Tony Stark, accidentally create a misanthropic eugenics/population control robot called Ultron. Oh oops.
correction: The data showing the weird onsets of the earthquakes were really scary graphs and whatsmore, were unrelated to climate! Earthquakes in Godzilla were properly lizard-induced, a theme worthily explored by “Pacific Rim” as well.
The best review I’ve seen so far had the line (paraphrasing):
“It’s never good when a complex film has a childish vision.”
and:
“An incredibly maudlin, preachy, annoyingly mercantile public service announcement aimed squarely at eight-year-olds.”
Saw the movie yesterday. If they want to hype the global warming scare, they’re about 20 years too late.
As far as I’ve seen, there are even a number of CAGW believers that believe the movie was overly heavy-handed, too focused on preaching at the expense of plot, and overall just plain mediocre.
First saw that from a guy who regularly lambasts “deniers” at every opportunity. I was shocked.