
A gross feeling washed over me during Buy Now, and not the intended disgust of the waste in our world. That admission of our hideous consumer culture had already been placed by numerous documentaries and news articles covering this topic with great detail. No, the true terror of this Netflix documentary is that it attempts to weave a satirical sci-fi staging on top of its interviews and stats. I’m sure this placement was meant to be a challenge, trying to see if the viewer could peer through the bullshit pushed out in corporate training videos and advertisements. In another light, however, it’s an insulting attempt to tantalize the viewer with trippy Black Mirror-esque slatherings.
It’s not that there isn’t essential information present here. The waste generated by fashion, food, tech, and Amazon has grown to such a grotesque degree. We get some interviews from those who have been in the belly of the beast, questioning the lacking thoughts about what happens to products when they wear out, won’t sell, or are supposedly recycled. The charm offensive is laid bare by those who knew the tactics best, making their worries about the future grounded and relatable, as well as the devotion to reversing course at the behest of corporate overlords.
Where the film falters is how it tries to connect the various topics together with the linking device of an AI-voice led training video. The satire is not all that clever, with few biting lines about the deception. There’s a weird effect that takes place when the guiding voice starts saying out loud the deceptive tactics for the viewer. She gives the audiences a break from the bleak by forcing us to watch cute pet videos, a distraction posed as a commentary on our ability to lose focus in our social media age. She speaks a command to show a CGI-rendered modeled of what all the wasted plastic and fabric would look like if it littered cities. The overflowing display is enough to make one question if these were really composited or crafted with AI. It doesn’t matter which; you still think it’s AI-generated. And when you start thinking about that, you start thinking of all the resources being wasted to improve AI when most of it looks like unwatchable garbage, as useless as the plastics being chucked into the ocean.
The VFX displays that try to bleed visuals together and spew out trash-based simulations end up being just as much of a vile distration as social media videos the film mocks us for gravitating towards. Is all this necessary? Do we need all this shit in a documentary that should be important enough to stand on its archival footage and interviews alone? This is so frustrating because are some genuinely good displays of animation used for depicting how Amazon’s market model was formed and the organization of recycled goods. Seriously, the scene with heaps of clothing washing up on the shores of a ravaged community does more to sell the horror than some procedurally generating flood of clothing enveloping Tokyo, looking like the world’s most obnoxious disaster movie.
There’s important stuff in Buy Now, but also so much insultingly useless visual fluff in between, becoming the waste this film aims to condemn. It may be visually appealing enough for younger audiences to take this topic seriously. But for any adults who have been keeping track of the waste problems in our world, this all comes off like routine review with an unneeded dystopian framing device. We don’t need all that. Our lives are already more surreal than dystopian filmmaking could ever match and the attempt to weave such relation through this documentary comes off as galling as that irritating friend who won’t stop telling you that life now resembles those grim sci-fi movies. We don’t need this Black Mirror episode shit; we’re already living this nightmare and don’t need to be insulted with an ill-fitted framing.