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I watched the new Knives Out movie, and while the mystery plot was fun enough, my enjoyment of the movie was severely hampered by politics. I saw the previous Knives Out movie so I knew what to expect, but I do feel like this just went above and beyond. Minor spoilers to follow.
My wife was disappointed that I let politics ruin a good movie for me, but really, I think that the filmmakers honestly don't want you to view this movie as just a fun murder mystery without the context of politics. The movie is all about making a heavy handed political statement.
The movie just seemed like a pulpit for Rian Johnson to talk about how much he hates Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and various other people. I almost feel like the entire plot is really the secondary goal. The main goal of him making this was to implant and grow a brain worm in the audience that every famous rich person is connected, really part of a cabal that got what they got through no talent of their own, took advantage of individuals and the world at large, contribute nothing, and are evil, vile, worthless, and bratty pieces of shit.
Nowhere in the movie do they ever display the slightest amount of sympathy for anyone besides the detective and the poor black woman who was taken advantage of (major spoiler:or her secret twin sister ). I guess this movie really makes me feel like in order to write good compelling characters, you really have to love them, or have the capacity to love them, or maybe just respect and understand and empathize with them. Rian Johnson clearly does none of this, and his utter contempt for them just seeps through. He comes across like a high school kid writing screenplays to take pot shots at people he hates.
I don't know, I really can't believe that this movie has gotten so much praise. It really irritates me, and just seems like lazy complaining.
Other minor, non political gripe:
The movie came to a screeching halt when they decided to have the entire 3rd quarter of the movie as a flashback. I think small flashbacks are great in mystery stories, but the decision to have over a half hour told in flashback made me feel like it was dragging, and made me want it to just get back to advancing the plot.
I saw bits of it while someone else in the house was watching it on streaming, but I've read the plot synopsis. I don't think this one is really a whodunnit, at least not in the classic Agatha Christie style; we more or less know who the murderer is right from the start (so it's in the Columbo style). Really this one, even more than its predecessor, is all about the politics: we're not watching to find out who the criminal is, or even how the detective will pin the crime on him, we're watching to see the bad white (mostly) privileged rich people get a roasting.
The layers of irony involved are as many layers as an onion, since the people who watch this to cheer the political views about "eat the rich" are white well-off (relatively) college-educated liberals who don't realise that they are part of the group being castigated, it's the same as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez showing up at the Met Gala in a designer gown with "Tax The Rich" on it - Sandy, you're showing up at the freakin' Met Gala in a "a custom Brother Vellies ivory wool jacket dress with an organza flounce", for a whole lot of people you are 'the rich' (even if you cry about how you can't make ends meet living in NYC on a measly representative's salary).
The (spoiler) destruction of the Mona Lisa is the same stupidity as the throwing soup protests or the line from back when all the antifa window smashing post Trump election was going on - 'are you saying property is more important than people?' The Musk stand-in could legitimately make the argument that congrats, Helen and Blanc, you have destroyed a possible solution to climate change. Yes, his energy source is risky, but the problem is that people need clean, cheap, energy and they need it fast. He might have the blood of one woman on his hands, but they have the blood of all the millions who will die due to flooding, storms, and drought-induced famine. Who is the bigger killer, here?
I have also thought that you could view the first "Knives Out" movie as one where the nurse really is guilty of the murder for the sake of the inheritance, manipulating the elderly rich novelist by 'befriending' him and then into committing suicide to protect her from what he thinks will be a mistaken charge of murder. She fools everyone including the detective and ends up enjoying her ill-gotten gains.
Maybe we're just dense, but my wife and I didn't know who the murderer was. We even speculated about a role for Chekov's stoner as we were watching.
Nah, they're a fairly racially representative group for the 2022 United States. The four Disruptors are a Latino bodybuilder, a black science guy, a white fashionista, and a white lady governor. If we count the tag-along people, that adds a white insta-influencer type and a cold-blooded Asian business-lady. The only bad-white-guy is the Elon Musk stand-in! If anything, I'd say the irrelevance of race to the plot is kind of striking given how heavy-handed the politics in the movie are more broadly. Ed Norton didn't screw Janelle Monae's black lady-genius for racial or gender reasons, they didn't even remotely suggest that was involved, he's just an asshole.
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Where did this idea come from? IPCC projects ~1 inch increase in annual rainfall per increase in degree with high regional granularity. The most agriculturally productive areas are projected to get even more rainfall than that (U.S. at >5x the global average for rainfall gain over the last 50 years) + increased insolation. After the umpteenth study debunking methane clathrate feedback loops and IPCC rejecting including it yet again, I genuinely don't understand the existential angst about climate change. We're banning fertilizer over this? Weird.
Specifically?
They are predicting increased drought frequency in like a third of the world, albeit not with much confidence.
But I suspect other contributing factors are:
Uncertainty (page 10 here is a giant swath of "low due to limited agreement" and "low due to limited evidence" entries in the precipitation categories). Historically scientists have freaked out when models show a 5% chance of utter doom (which is somewhat fair; you don't tell someone considering a round of Russian Roulette that they'll probably be okay), and reporters have dutifully truncated this to "models show ... utter doom".
Expertise limited to climate modeling, not logistics. It's just not intuitive that a cheap "reefer" can put tens of thousands of pounds of refrigerated food on the other side of an ocean for a few thousand bucks. I'd bet everyone predicting famine has eaten southern-hemisphere fruit in the middle of a northern-hemisphere winter, but without stopping to think of what that kind of thing implies. There is some level of irony here, in that the safest solution to "localized droughts in pre-industrialized areas can be murderous" might be "fix pre-industrialized areas" and this could be made more difficult by attempting the solution "fix localized droughts" instead, but if you've spent a lifetime studying precipitation then that's where you naturally go.
(I suspect a reasonable compromise solution would be to work on the drought problem by moving industrialized countries to nuclear+electric as quickly as possible, while working on the pre-industrialized problem by letting such countries' citizens use (or give or sell) fossil fuel "credits" for much longer, until "just pay for another cargo ship and truck/train fleet" becomes an attainable solution for them too, but this strikes me as a reasonable compromise in part because I'm confident it would piss off everybody.)
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But we don’t know who the murderer is from the beginning.Rather, we know who the bad guy is. He happens to end up being the murderer, but that is not the same thing.
A better twist would have been "this is the obvious Bad Guy, we've seen it proven that he screwed over Genius Black Lady, he must be the - wait a second, what do you mean that person is the murderer????" but it wouldn't have worked for Johnson's set up in these two movies that "rich people = villains and murderers".
(I still think that having the Latina nurse really be a murderer and pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, including the detective, would have been a better movie, but oh well).
Yes, I think I mentioned further down that I wish the sequel had been based on that premise, and had come out after the detective had helped her defeat the attempts of the family to disqualify the nurse.
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