Don't Look Down

The alien invasion is coming from inside the house.

A scant two years ago Don't Look Up presented viewers with a jaundiced look at a present-day America where every commercial and cultural current pushed online and TV audiences deep into denial about the huge asteroid coming to wipe out all life on Earth. The film's crescendo [light spoilers] features a vocal (and distinctly Fox News-ish) political constituency, supported by a vocal (and distinctly Trumpian) lady president, chanting in borderline delirium that they, and the world, must not look up -- that's just what they want you to do!

There's also a whacked-out version of Elon Musk crossed with Marshall Herff Applewhite, Jr., a.k.a. Do, the Heaven's Gate cult leader of Hale-Bopp fame, whose think-big fix for the asteroid problem falls short, and whose allies in government, it intriguingly seems, sabotage the Russian-Chinese effort to sort out the unwanted visitor from outer space.

The film's earnest lesson was that today's regime had become so dialed in on messaging and political fan service that the costs of our increasingly post-facts era were rising to the level of an existential threat, one the film implicitly associated with aggregate human effects on climate and weather.

All a bit headsnapping then that 2023's live-action spectacular features a synced-up information-management complex insisting we do look up -- at the mysterious show in the sky that might just not, as the Chinese claim, be climate-and-weather balloons, and, well, the authorities are not ruling anything out about the objects plural with the funny shapes and the unknown modes of propulsion... taking us from Mulder's famous I WANT TO BELIEVE poster to The Intelligence urging us on to believe, or to do act as if we do.

What don't they want us to see down below?