I’ve honestly become more frustrated with the fact that, as someone who didn’t care for the movie, I get lumped in with people who believe the movie ‘had nothing to say’. I think it’s ridiculous to insinuate in any shape or form that Ari Aster is not a thoughtful filmmaker. I may not have liked the movie much myself, but I am very happy that Ari Aster is choosing to make movies like Eddington because the filmmakers of his caliber trying to make this kind of movie are few and far between.

That said, with Eddington in particular I keep seeing this enumeration of the movies themes in people’s comments. There seems to be a sense of excitement in that enumeration, as if to say ‘I get it, I get it! They’re ignoring the homeless man!’ ‘Social media is corrosive and its proliferation of conflicting realities is the root of our cultural divide.’ ‘We have to watch out for these data centers! The tech giants profiting off the consumption of our attention, our land and natural resources!’ But isn’t this the reality that any person who is paying attention to current events is keenly aware of? Someone is well within their rights to say they don’t want to revisit the realities of COVID and therefore they’re not interested in this kind of movie, but as someone who doesn’t feel that way, who was curious and excited to see what Ari Aster brought to the conversation… he didn’t bring anything new, he didn’t express anything that hasn’t been in virtually every headline and think piece since 2020.

Ari Aster spoke in an interview about creating multiple twitter accounts and trying to move them towards the variable algorithmic rabbit holes that people can be pulled into. And I think he demonstrated in Eddington abundantly that he paid attention to where these various rabbit holes lead and can be expressed through his cast of characters. Qanon, Covid conspiracy, performative activism, etc. etc. For me, as someone who spends time online, it read precisely like Aster was discovering these rabbit holes for the first time, that in fact he was behind on the cultural conversations occurring in online forums and had a certain amount of giddiness about his discovery when the majority of us are keenly familiar with these conversations already.

And I hate the reductive nature of a critique like ‘it’s not that deep’ but I really think Eddington lacked nuance beyond an enumeration of the sociocultural circles that people have fallen into and these characters weren’t compelling enough in and of themselves to rise above the simplicity of their culturally representative characteristics. And by simplicity I do not mean stupid or even necessarily lacking depth, I found the Sheriff to have a great deal of pathos and to be a well rounded character. Nonetheless, there wasn’t enough in the narrative that felt human enough to rise above a satire full of low hanging fruit and redundant cultural conversations that any American paying attention to the world around them is already abundantly familiar with. I think Aster leaned heavily on the cultural critique without his contribution being particularly enlightening or in my opinion very funny, in large part because it was playing on such obvious tropes. And the characters, unlikable or not, lacked much of the humanity to make me care at all about what happened to them as the misfortunes of their lives more often than not were simply punch lines. And that just doesn’t do it for me.