BASH’s tech is unproven and its proposed procedure non-peer-reviewed. Instead of pursuing a strategy that guarantees humanity’s survival, Isherwell persuades Orlean to embrace a high-risk, high-reward alternative: Allow BASH to use its proprietary technology to fragment the comet, divert its pieces into the ocean, and then collect them for mineral mining. Isherwell’s corporation has discovered that the comet contains trillions of dollars’ worth of rare-earth elements that could greatly expand the capacities of its smartphonelike products. Her change of heart comes courtesy of Peter Isherwell, the billionaire CEO of tech firm BASH and super-donor to Orlean’s presidential campaign. launches a bunch of nuclear weapons at the comet, and the mission is poised for total success when Orlean abruptly calls it off.

President Orlean proceeds to change her tune. So Dibiasky and Mindy take their story to the media, which promptly vilifies the former as a mentally unstable worrywart while celebrating the latter mostly for being handsome (unlike many other films that cast beautiful men as nebbish professors, Don’t Look Up is refreshingly forthright about the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio is hot even with a beard and a bunch of nervous tics). They try to alert the White House to this threat, but President Janie Orlean’s administration would rather keep the comet under wraps until after the midterm elections. The film begins with two Michigan State University astronomers - graduate student Kate Dibiasky and (long-unpublished) professor Randall Mindy - discovering that a “planet-killing” comet is six months away from colliding with Earth. To elucidate the problems with Don’t Look Up’s satirical vision, we first need to spoil its plot. This is a narrative fit for winning the retweets of middle-class American liberals but not for understanding the world we live in or the forces threatening to end it. Don’t Look Up casts the conflict between minimizing climate risk and maximizing near-term economic growth as one pitting the interests of billionaires against those of everyone else - or, in a few moments, as one pitting Americans’ base interest in retail therapy against their repressed longing for a less materialistic and more communitarian way of life. In the film’s populist, polemical account of the ecological crisis, there is no genuine technical or logistical obstacle to neutralizing the threat, no need for Americans to tolerate significant disruptions to their existing way of life, no vexing question of global redistribution, no compelling benefits from ongoing carbon-intensive growth, and thus no rational or uncorrupted opponent of timely climate action. It is a cinematic elaboration of liberal Twitter’s most ideologically flattering, identity-affirming narratives about climate change. Yet Don’t Look Up is itself a transparent product of its authors’ immersion in social-media echo chambers. McKay’s film skewers social media for privileging ideologically flattering, identity-affirming narratives over honest reckonings with inconvenient truths. And the pathologies of for-profit media and campaign finance aren’t the primary obstacles to rapid decarbonization. Climate change isn’t much like a planet-killing comet. Nevertheless, Don’t Look Up badly misconstrues the crisis it’s meant to illuminate. The notion that a threat as immediate and universally menacing as a descending comet could become culture-war fodder - thereby turning the mere act of “looking up” into a litmus test for partisan allegiance - is a bit too plausible at a time when anti-vaxx identity politics has pushed U.S.

Although written before the pandemic, many of its social criticisms feel sharper in 2022 than they would have in 2019. Even as the Dibiasky comet bears down on Earth, media outlets carry on spotlighting frivolities and fomenting culture wars, while politicians keep privileging the whims of billionaire donors over the needs of humanity writ large. Don’t Look Up portrays a United States so intoxicated by decadent consumerism, and so corrupted by polarized, plutocratic politics, that it cannot make deflecting a doomsday rock a national priority. His aim was to render the absurdity of our collective response to global warming more visible by likening the problem to a starker existential threat: a “planet-killer” comet on a collision course with Earth. But it aspires to be something more.Īs he has emphasized in interviews, director Adam McKay conceived of the film as an allegory for the climate crisis. Don’t Look Up is an obscenely overlong, occasionally funny satire of American media and politics.

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