Should art have a message? Yes, says director Adam McKay (The big short), and that message couldn’t be more subtle: humanity is perishing without resistance and, the implicit suggestion is, maybe that’s for the better. Don’t Look Up, which came in at Christmas as the third most popular movie on Netflix, starring a host of famous actors, symbolizes the “terrifying ignoring of humanity’s biggest problem.” This refers to the climate, although the film is about a comet that is approaching Earth at great speed. We only have six months left, say two astronomers, a PhD student and a professor.
Don’t Look Up is an at times fat and amusing satire, starting with the title. Everyone stares at screens as the end rapidly approaches. In a key scene, Professor Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) gets out of his car in a traffic jam and points the honking drivers to the night sky where the comet can be seen with the naked eye for the first time. The most biting scenes are those in which the US president (a nihilistic-populist Meryl Streep) light-heartedly dismisses the warnings and then uses them in his own interest. This is further underlined by an eerie entrepreneur who wants to capture the comet to harvest scarce metals (and is a major sponsor of the president). All attempts to stop the comet fail because of intrigue and self-interest.
This is also a movie about the democratic crisis in the US with the media in the lead. They pass by in their totally meaningless entertainment where everything is equalized, pseudo-facts and science next to minions of show business stars. Data, privacy, social media manipulation, election rallies, adultery, with time travel at the end – everything tumbles over each other.
Credibility is of minor importance in a satire, but it grinds that so much remains unnecessarily clumsy: obscure scientists who without any cooperation discover a comet that is already so close, when no one else has seen it and two days later already with a military transport plane to the Oval Office. Also, the estimates of mass and speed (“between 3 and 10 kilometers,” as if you didn’t need to know that accurately to set course) make little sense, while astronomy is undertaken by global teams. It is downright evil that the young researcher appears on a show screaming hysterically, and her supervisor is belittled as a sedative, adulterous husband. That should symbolize the tragedy of science.
But there are more fundamental objections than lack of nuance and credibility. The metaphor of a comet that wipes out humanity in one fell swoop is incorrect. Climate change, however compelling, is a matter of many events occurring simultaneously and sequentially. Not everything goes down at once and permanently. Ecosystems and people have time to adapt. Also, the suggestion that nothing is happening yet is far too short-sighted. Think about how much windmills determine the landscape, and about electric cars, alternative materials, recycling, new land use, sustainable investing. They are steps, insufficient, but not nothing. Unfortunately, we are evolutionarily more sensitive to bad news than to positive prospects.
That’s why Don’t Look Up not just a well-intentioned but harmless caricature. By only feeding the sense of hopelessness instead of the innovative power that drives humanity forward, the film ultimately confirms a hopeless doomsday in which neither knowledge nor integrity play a role.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of January 24, 2022
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