This is the biggest reason, I suspect, that the movie is a commercial hit and conversation fodder even for people who dislike it: Because it opens one of the widest lenses on American decadence since the years when “The Wire” and “The Sopranos” were both on HBO.

Yet I’m still one of the critics who thought the movie failed in the end, because its impulse to indict everyone, from TV news to social media, is in tension with its desire to deliver a pious message about Listening to Science. The latter impulse ensures that its satire is gentlest when it takes on the expert class, the academic-industrial complex. And its plot ultimately turns on a single terrible decision by a populist president, the systemic critique sacrificed to ideological point-scoring.

But since the movie is almost the comprehensive portrait of decadence we need, I’m going to offer some script doctoring, and give you the cut of “Don’t Look Up” that might have been, had somebody hired me to consult. Here goes: