Title: Don't Look Up
Rating: 5 Stars
It all starts off when doctoral candidate in astronomy Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) was doing some analysis on stars in the universe. She notices a large, previously unknown comet. This stirs up all kinds of excitement on her team. Her mentor, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), steps in and helps to plot its course.
Much to their shock, it is heading to Earth with a near certain probability of collision. It's a larger object than the one that struck the planet and killed off the dinosaurs. The collision will happen in a little over six months. In a panic, they call NASA. They end up meeting with Dr Teddy Oglethrope (Rob Morgan), in charge of defending our planet from such events. He immediately recognizes the significance of what they're presenting to him and orders them to Washington to consult with the President.
Here things begin to take a turn. President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her chief of staff, who just happens coincidentally to be her son, Jason (Jonah Hill), have bigger fish to fry than a world ending event. Mid terms are coming up. They have a Supreme Court justice appointment that is in trouble due to nude photos. They just can't be bothered with this right now.
Desperate to get the info out, the three decide to leak to the press. Unfortunately, the strain gets to be too much for Dibiasky and she freaks out during a live interview, hurting her credibility and becoming an instant meme. Mindy does much better and becomes a media sensation.
Later circumstances have changed and the President decides to launch a shuttle to try to alter the course of the comet. Unfortunately, eccentric tech billionaire Peter Isherwill (Mark Rylance) finds out that the comet is composed of trillions of dollars of rare material and manages to convince the President to cancel the shuttle mission shortly after liftoff. Isherwill believes that he has a way to break up the comet into smaller chunks and have them land in the oceans to be harvested.
Meanwhile the clock is ticking. People doubt that the comet exists. They doubt that, even if it does exist, that it will cause much damage. They call the highly skilled and highly experienced scientists alarmists.
The comet appears in the night sky. Even though it is now available to the naked eye, the President launches a campaign to not look up. What you can't see can't hurt you.
As the clock ticks down, will Isherwill's plan save the planet? Or are we witnessing the end of the human experiment?
Believe it or not, this is a comedy. Granted it is very dark. However, considering what we're currently going through, there probably isn't going to be a better film that sums up this point in history.
This film must make today's epidemiologists and virologists feel seen. Just like the astronomers here, these people have spent their entire lives understanding contagious disease. For the first time in 100 years, they had their chance to lend the world their expertise. Instead, they have been demonized. Prominent news organizations accuse them of being fascists. Some states have restricted their public health duties. People dying of COVID refuse to acknowledge it even as they are placed on ventilators.
If not the epidemiologists, how about the climate scientists? For decades they have been warning of climate change. Models that they created decades ago to show the consequences of climate change that were at that time accused of being alarmist have proved to understate the seriousness of climate change. Ferocious weather events that rarely happened now seem to be occurring regularly. Even now though, tens of millions of Americans are skeptics or accuse these scientists of having some secret political agenda. Meanwhile, every year gets just a little bit hotter.
Let's not forget about Stop the Steal. President Biden received seven million more votes than ex-President Trump. The deciding states weren't really even that close. Some states have recounted their votes three times with no change. Sixty lawsuits have been filed and have been thrown out. There is no evidence of fraud. To election experts, fraud occurring at the level of the Trump accusations is nearly unthinkably impossible. There is not a single credible expert on American voting that believes otherwise. However, there are still news organizations actively pushing out the narrative. Some sixty percent of Republicans believe that Biden stole the election. That is tens of millions of people believing something that is completely irrational.
All of the sudden, telling people to just "Don't Look Up" to ignore the reality of an impending comet does not seem to be that much of a stretch.
If there's a problem with the film, it is that our world is so messed up that it's hard to get in front of it with satire. Think of President Orlean and her idiot son Chief of Staff. Streep and Hill both play their characters broadly for comic effect, but nothing they do seems that unthinkable after we've just had four years of Donald Trump and his children. It barely even raises an eyebrow.
In a similar manner, the film satirizes the feel good news interview team with Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry) and Brie Evantree (Cate Blanchett). Both Perry and Blanchett do good work, but is what they're doing really any all that different than Fox and Friends? It does skewer the news' misogyny by having Evantree having multiple masters degrees and speaking multiple languages but still relegating her to the low cut blonde bimbo news interviewer role.
Silicon Valley and its worship of billionaire tech founders do not come out looking good either. No mere mortals are supposed to make eye contact with Isherwell as he stumbles and mutters his prognostications. His plan is outlandish and untested, yet the government accepts it without a murmur. It goes without saying that, as his plans fall apart, he has created a separate plan just for himself and an anointed few. I know that people might make comparisons to Bezos, Musk, and Branson, but I think of Peter Thiel and his plans to 'seastead' as an escape from climate change.
As I watched it, the film that I felt that it was most connected to was Network. I say this not just because both Lawrence and DiCaprio have their "I'm mad as hell" live television moment. Network took current trends at that time and projected them just a bit further and more extreme. People were shocked that that could be the future of entertainment. Now, 45 years later, Network, if anything, seems quaint in its predictions.
A decade or two down the line, will we be saying the same about Don't Look Up? As we sit in some Midwestern state, having given up on the coastal states and the Southwest due to climate disasters and as we listen to President for Life Ivanka Trump, will we hearken back to this more innocent era?
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