Has there ever been a good movie about climate change?

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The Day After Tomorrow, from the filmmakers behind Independence Day, was hokey disaster schlock; Don't Look Up, from the director of The Big Short, was a relentlessly cringey metaphor movie; the little-seen How To Blow Up a Pipeline was somewhat better, but its intendedly sympathetic tale of climate radicalism was an own goal that inadvertently indicted its activist-terrorists as neurotic whack jobs. Interstellar and Project Hail Mary are much better films by any measure, but their status as "climate cinema" is at least arguable. And they are, rather notably, about the importance and vitality of risk taking and human ingenuity in the face of civilizational challenges, not pious lectures about consumption, capitalism, and environmental doom. Smug, self-satisfied lectures about human depravity generally don't make for great movies.

Turns out that's true even with a top-tier director and the world's biggest movie star. Digger, the new movie from director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and star Tom Cruise, is a spectacular misfire, conceptually bold and occasionally intriguing, but mostly just an exercise in teeth-grinding awfulness.

In fairness, the film actively intends to be terrible. It's an over-the-top satire of climate villainy, with a prickly oil baron (Cruise) as its central figure and a pompous president (John Goodman) plus his cabinet of advisers in supporting roles. Shortly after the film begins, an oil rig on a glacier explodes, creating a massive iceberg that's headed straight for Europe, with untold casualties and damage likely. Whatever shall they do? Mostly, it turns out, stand around and exclaim things to each other in intentionally hammy accents. The overacting is excruciating; the satire is brutally on the nose. It's painful and unpleasant to watch, and, all right, it's supposed to be. This is not interpretation or speculation.

To explain why requires some spoilers. You've been warned.

See, it turns out that the overacted, hammy, unbearably obvious bits are all part of a play, a play that we eventually find out is being performed decades in the future, after the real-life climate catastrophe depicted in the play actually occurred. These future citizens are looking back and laughing at the climate follies of our present, but as the film goes on, it becomes clear that they are living through the very real consequences of that folly. The future is a postapocalyptic climate wasteland where the consequences of climate change have been all too real. Cruise's actor character, the man playing the oil baron, repeatedly argues with the director about the tone, asking whether the hammy satire is appropriate for the subject matter. We are supposed to understand that, fundamentally, it isn't.

The film's big idea is, essentially, that you should feel bad about laughing, about escaping, about enjoying, well, anything, really. And so it forces viewers to sit through a willingly rotten bit of theater in order to drive home the point that satire isn't enough, and indeed, entertainment can be a cheat for the wealthy and powerful who want to escape real responsibility.

I'll say this for Cruise and Iñárritu: At least they had the daring to lecture us conceptually, to force viewers to engage with their message through a theatrical, metanarrative conceit. They're trying, and while this hectoring climate change movie is, like others before it, a failure, it is, at times, an interesting failure, an ambitious disaster. But it's still a disaster.

Making an intentionally turgid and terrible production and then underlining how awful it is doesn't really change the fact that it is turgid and terrible. This high-concept wreck of a movie wants people to feel rotten about enjoyment, about humor, about the pleasures of art and escapism in the face of what it views as a totalizing global disaster. This is a movie intentionally designed to annoy, to irritate, to grate on your nerves in order to make a point. It wants you to feel bad about watching it, and in that sense, I suppose it succeeded.

The post Tom Cruise's New Climate Disaster Movie, Digger, Is a Disaster appeared first on Reason Magazine.

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Credit: Puck/MoffettNathason

The Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics will be the operational equivalent of producing “200 Super Bowls in a month,” LA28 chairperson and president Casey Wasserman said Thursday. For NBC, televising it will be nearly as ambitious.

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NBC is preparing an unprecedented amount of coverage for the Games, according to Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of programming for NBC Olympics and Paralympics, dramatically expanding its output from the last Summer Olympics held in the U.S. in Atlanta in 1996.

The staggering increase illustrates the challenge facing NBC and LA28 less than two years before the Games: staging and televising an enormously complicated global event while making it feel simple, emotional and entertaining for viewers. The two sides have spent years working together on everything from when marquee events take place to how NBC can quickly turn unfamiliar athletes into characters audiences care about.

“In 1996, we produced 171 hours on NBC — 171 total,” Solomon said during Puck and MoffettNathanson’s In the Arena conference in New York. “In 2028, we are going to program more than 100 each day on NBC and our cable networks.”

That doesn’t include Peacock offerings such as Gold Zone and individual event streams, she noted.

Wasserman offered another way to illustrate the scale, saying organizers expect roughly 1 million transportation trips per day as major competitions unfold simultaneously across Southern California.

“We’ll produce 200 Super Bowls in a month,” he said. “The scale and the complexity, it requires a lot of planning. It requires a lot of logistics. It requires a lot of technical expertise.”

Wasserman has continued to lead LA28 amid controversy over emails he exchanged with Ghislaine Maxwell more than two decades ago that surfaced in the Epstein files earlier this year. The fallout led to his exit from his namesake talent and sports agency, which later rebranded as The Team, while LA28’s executive committee backed him remaining in his Olympics role.

For NBC, the challenge is getting audiences invested almost instantly in athletes they may rarely see outside the Olympics.

“We’ve got to make you care in 20 seconds or less,” Solomon said, adding that athlete profiles, announcers and new production technology will help give viewers context around competitors they may not know, making the Olympics feel as much like an entertainment show as a sports competition.

“You’re watching the most meaningful day of someone’s life every 20 minutes,” she further stated.

NBC’s influence also extends to when viewers will see those moments. The network and LA28 have been working together on the competition schedule since 2020, including efforts to keep marquee events from competing against one another.

“We got to solve for NBC first, because that is the most important thing, full stop, without exception,” Wasserman said.

NBC also sees LA28 as an opportunity to cultivate a new generation of Olympics fans, with Solomon pointing to Gen Z, Gen Alpha and even some millennials who missed out on years of the traditional Olympics experience during the pandemic.

For Wasserman, though, the enormous infrastructure behind the Games ultimately serves a much simpler purpose. “People don’t come to that,” he said of the logistics. “They come to the competition and the stories and the environment.”

The post LA28 Chief Casey Wasserman Says Olympics Will Be ‘200 Super Bowls in a Month’ appeared first on TheWrap.

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