New Netflix offering Don’t Look Up gives a dark, yet brilliantly entertaining exploration of the current social and political dynamic surrounding science. The film's director Adam Mckay has created some exceptional political-themed blockbusters in recent years including Vice (2018), which details how Dick Cheney redefined the power associated with his Vice President appointment under Bush and The Big Short (2015), which follows a small group of financial speculators who bet against the stock market before the 2008 crash. Given how McKay’s past movies have been so well delivered, I was excited to learn that his latest Netflix offering would be (indirectly) about climate change, the issue that first got me hooked on politics and international relations.
Don’t Look Up begins with the discovery of a comet by Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence) and it is quickly confirmed that comet Dibiasky is due to collide with Earth in just six and a half months, destroying the planet. She, along with Ph.D. supervisor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) reaches out to the government to let them know and the two protagonists are invited to the White House to speak to President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her failson Jason (Jonah Hill) who also happens to be the White House Chief of Staff. They also meet Dr. Oglethorpe of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, who is responsible for planning the response to such events and communicating with those in office.
The president and her son are both cartoonishly incompetent and dismiss the credible claims that an impact event is imminent despite other government officials and scientists confirming their calculations. Dibiasky and Mindy are quickly struck by the fact that those in power are more interested in the upcoming elections and overcoming personal scandals than actually addressing real issues, even ones as severe as their discovery. They decide to leak the story to the press instead and go on a news/chat show called the Daily Rip to communicate their findings to the public.
We then see a split between the two protagonists as Dibiasky struggles to maintain a calm, reassuring presence on TV while Mindy attempts to act in an out-of-character “media trained” manner. As Mindy spends more time around those in power we get to learn more about the President, her son, and one of my favorite characters, billionaire Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) who parodies the likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerburg. Eventually, due to a political scandal involving the president and an upcoming midterm election, the president decides to launch a mission to destroy the comet and galvanize the people behind her. This leads to a theatrical announcement to the world about plans to save the world from impending doom, complete with red, white, and blue fireworks.
As an “Eagle-Platinum” donor, Isherwell has full clearance to access the president at any time, and during the mission to destroy the comet, he intercedes as his research team realized that the comet contains trillions of dollars worth of rare earth elements and other precious metal that could be extracted for profit. The mission is aborted after a promising start and new plans are introduced to use recent, yet to be peer-reviewed, technology to extract these resources before destroying the comet.
Dibiasky becomes disillusioned and, after an incident where she publicly reveals the secret government plans to make themselves “more disgustingly rich”, she is cut from any contact with government officials, including Mindy who is now Science Advisor to the President. She befriends some skaters who share her political views and continues to live up to her rebellious spirit.
Eventually, Mindy is removed from his government position after a meltdown moment on TV where he calls the president and Isherwell “fascists”. After spotting the comet in the sky for the first time he reconvenes with Dibiasky and Dr. Oglethorpe to carry out a last-ditch campaign to save the planet and force action against the US government and to encourage other countries to carry out their own missions to alter the trajectory of the comet. While they give everything to make the people know the truth they ultimately know that the BASH mission led by Isherwell is probably not going to succeed and they decide to go back to Mindy’s home to be surrounded by their friends and family. The movie cleverly cuts between everyone preparing their meal together and having a good time and the unfolding of the BASH mission, which is clearly not going to plan as drones keep failing.
My favorite part of the movie is the ending where we see the stark contrast between the heroes of the movie, who have exhausted everything in their power to help prevent disaster, and those in power who ignored or downplayed the science at every turn and tried to turn an extinction-scale event into an opportunity to make money. The heroes of the movie are condemned to stay on a doomed Earth while those with power run away to the nearest habitable planet with a secretly built ship. This is, of course, an unsubtle nod to the fact that the wealthiest in society are not going to be impacted by the worst impacts of climate change. Instead, it will be regular, everyday people that suffer while those who caused the crisis will be fine. It is especially worth noting that the majority of escapees are old, again a nod to the fact that many of those responsible do not need to worry about the consequences of climate breakdown - they will be dead long before.
The conclusion to the film is steeped in the cynicism that McKay brings with many of his movies but he is spot on drawing the parallels between the events of the movie with real life. We have also seen similar events unfold during the COVID-19 pandemic - world leaders like Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Jair Bolsonaro have botched their responses to a deadly pandemic and used it as a political weapon while billionaires have seen astronomical growth in their wealth and power. Disaster capitalism has played out as it has done so many times before and so it’s healthy to be cynical in my view. Cynicism grounded in reality is a better alternative to the false hope that many activists and scientists advocate for. We have had the opportunity to understand the threat of climate change for several decades. It isn’t like the sudden impact the movie depicts, however we are still so far behind as a species when it comes to where we should be in the fight against climate change.
In addition to the ending moments, a stand out scene earlier sees Pete Isherwell respond to being referred to as a “businessman” while Mindy questions his plan to extract minerals from the comet, particularly due to the skipping of the peer review process. Isherwell, being a billionaire with a giant ego, believes his plan will work without subjecting it to the standard scientific practice of a peer-review process. He responds to Mindy by predicting his “unremarkable” death where he will be alone in his final moments. In reality, Mindy dies at the end of the movie surrounded by his family and friends with dignity while Isherwell leaves to live out his life on another planet, probably where he will end up as Bronteroc food. Afterall, the president’s power on Earth was not enough to save her from the same fate.
I also enjoyed the scene where Mindy finally breaks down on TV. After being brought on to a morning chat show to be a calming voice to the people he realises he can no longer go on pretending that things are fine and that the corruption taking place could destroy the entire planet. It feels as though it is Leonardo DiCaprio, famous for his environmentalism, rather than Mindy, giving an impassioned rant about how we have allowed political divisions to blind us.
I am full of praise for how Adam McKay and the brilliant cast put this movie together during such a challenging time and how the use of humor is applied to make the horrifying underlying themes easier to digest. The movie encompasses so many important aspects of society and human behavior, corruption in politics, wealth inequality (and billionaire egos) as well as the disparity between science, which is motivated by a need to understand, and politics, which is about personal power, money and appeasing donors. It also explores, to a lesser extent, the breakdown between international communities in coming together to fight a common enemy, issues related to elitist attitudes towards universities (the discovery is initially not taken seriously by those in power as Michigan State University is not an Ivy League School) and attitudes towards women in STEM. While little screen time is allocated towards these issues, the decision to include them and not over-saturate the main themes is a wise decision from the writers.
While the messaging may come across as frustratingly on the nose or too preachy to some, I think McKay does a great job at communicating how it must feel to be an epidemiologist or climate scientist over recent years and decades. The need for urgent action addressing these issues should not even be debated, the science is already clear - as Dibiasky says in the film “maybe the destruction of the entire planet isn’t supposed to be fun”. Yet we live in a world where a disease that has killed more than 5 million people is being denied and downplayed by huge swathes of the population and the inconvenience of wearing a mask is being portrayed as a problem. Overall, I think the movie is a worthy addition to McKay’s body of work and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with in the future. I am usually not a fan of disaster movies, however this one has so much to offer I will definitely revisit it many times and highly reccomend to anyone who likes a politically charged movie.
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