In the Comet Catastrophe Satire "Don't Look Up," the Real Threat Isn’t in the Sky
The monster in Adam McKay's apocalyptic film isn't the climate crisis, a comet collision, social media or corporate titans. It’s human nature and our big blind spot for bad news.
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You're a TV producer facing this dawn news rundown: A "planet killer" comet is six months from a collision with Earth. Pop superstars are set to reconcile live on camera after a breakup.
Which story gets top billing on your hot morning talk show? In filmmaker Adam McKay's world, there's no doubt. The end of the world can wait.
In our real world, all too often the same dynamic seems to dominate.
Welcome to "Don't Look Up," a satire as dark as a black hole telling the bumpy tale of two obscure astronomers who discover an Earthbound comet and try to get the world to listen, and act.
Played by Academy Award winners Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, the duo, tenured Michigan State professor Randall Mindy and doctoral candidate Kate Dibiasky, unsurprisingly face a series of obstacles after she spots an unnerving smear of light on a routine late-night scan of a distant galaxy and Mindy calculates terrestrial devastation.
Like scientists in a long lineage of disaster movies, they do their best to trigger a response. Things don't go well.
The first barrier is a White House too distracted by a sex scandal and looming mid-term elections to pay attention. For a foretaste, watch the trailer to see how this is played by Meryl Streep as POTUS and Jonah Hill as her sycophantic son and chief of staff. (Hill told one interviewer he built his character by imagining "if Fyre Festival was a person." I think he nailed it.)
The next barrier rises after a leak to the news media is planned by the scientists' one governmental ally, Teddy Oglethorpe, the head of NASA's Planetary Defense division.
As Oglethorpe, played by Rob Morgan, enters the story, McKay - who wrote, directed and produced the film for Netflix - splices in a cutaway to the NASA division's shoulder patch with the words "This is a real place." (Indeed it is, and if you missed it, I hope you'll read my recent piece about NASA's DART mission, which has sent a probe out to collide with an asteroid next fall in the first physical test of a planetary-defense system.)
But the mainstream and fluff media, not seeing a lot of clicks, both abandon the story, prompting the professor and student along different paths revealing ever more layers and flavors of human foibles and flaws.
DiCaprio’s scientist, after blubbering jargon early in the movie, is seduced by the spotlight - literally (by Cate Blanchett as one of the morning-show hosts). The president pivots to launching an Armageddon-style, planetary-defense fusillade as a distraction from her political plight and Professor Mindy is recruited as a Fauci-style voice of science.
Oscar-winner Mark Rylance enters the fray playing a wispy-voiced tech titan whose ubiquitous operating system knows everything about everyone and who convinces the administration to exploit the metal and mineral riches in the comet instead of deflecting it.
As the corporate takeover turns the deflection effort into a dangerous comet-harvesting play, the grad student, exuding Greta Thunberg-style rage, devolves toward doomerism - which isn't surprising considering that she gets bundled into the back seat of a government sedan with a bag over her head for screaming the truth.
Ultimately, the humanity of Mindy, Dibiasky, Oglethorpe and a small cohort of semi-sane earthlings shines through even as everything falls apart.
I was super eager to see this film, which has a limited theatrical run starting Friday and begins streaming on December 24.
Early this week, I was able to attend an advance Manhattan screening and conversation with DiCaprio as well as with Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill, who play the corrupt, narcissistic president and her fawning son and chief of staff.
HERE'S MY POST ON DICAPRIO'S REMARKS AT THE SCREENING
The reviews of the movie so far range from positive to passionately negative (I provide some links below). It's not great art, despite the plot's resonance with Stanley Kubrick's classic 1964 nuclear apocalypse satire "Dr. Strangelove" and DiCaprio's incendiary on-air speech paralleling Peter Finch's 1976 "I'm mad as hell" rant in "Network."
But "Don't Look Up" is a great provocation and full of touches that I appreciated as a journalist with three and a half decades on what I call the "blah, blah, blah, bang" beat.
I hope you'll watch the film and weigh in with your reactions, pro or con, in the comments. We can revisit key questions and ideas in a later post.
McKay began writing the script well before the pandemic, and from the start told journalists he saw the incoming comet as a compressed stand-in for the slow-motion, unfolding, still-unaddressed calamity of human-driven climate change.
In 2004, the filmmaker Roland Emmerich turned climate change into a world-devouring monster by fast-forwarding a scenario in which warming shuts down an ocean current triggering a deep freeze. (See my article on that film in the readings below).
But Emmerich's films all tend to have some element of triumph.
McKay's habit of whittling almost all of his characters down to their weaknesses doesn't surprise me. Keep in mind his production company, Hyperobject Industries, is named for the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton's word for phenomena, like climate change, that can be all-consuming but are too big to comprehend (or act on).
As Morton put it in a 2015 High Country News essay, "It’s like being inside the gigantic worm in 'The Empire Strikes Back.' For a while, you can kid yourself that you’re not inside a gigantic worm, until it starts digesting you." [Insert: At the bottom of the post I've added an excerpt from Ben Goldfarb's fantastic High Country News story digging in on this aspect of McKay's movie.]
At the New York City screening, DiCaprio made a case for the film that echoes my feelings.
"The best thing an artist can do, and that’s what Adam did with this film, is try to create a conversation," DiCaprio said. "As much as it is about climate change it’s about holding a mirror on us - what we’re distracted by, what we value, and ultimately how we deal with bad news."
I did appreciate some small touches. What's not to love about a film that mentions the phrase "peer reviewed science" more than I've ever heard in any other piece of pop-culture media?
The Uncertainty Monster
A prime focus of the film is misinterpretation and malicious exploitation of uncertainty, which - in climate debates - is often either glossed over or overemphasized by camps with different agendas.
I just explored these aspects of "Don't Look Up" in a Sustain What webcast with Amy Mainzer, the University of Arizona astronomy professor who was a science adviser to McKay and the cast and directs NASA's new Near Earth Object Surveyor Mission.
“We really wanted to try to portray the struggle of scientists to communicate when we have news that is not necessarily good and the frustrations a lot of scientists feel when we are ignored or marginalized either by conspiracy theorists or special interests,” Mainzer told me.
For more, watch our conversation, in which I recalled how communication consultants in 2010 advised the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to avoid using the word uncertainty, along with words like risk and significant - an approach I see as exactly the wrong thing to do.
Viewing
"A 'Do Look Up' Chat with Planetary Defender Amy Mainzer"
Leonardo DiCaprio discusses the film at a Manhattan screening
Justice Brice Guariglia, an artist and photographer, created a series of installations using solar-powered flashing road signs showing phrases inspired by Timothy Morton's hyperobject concept including "We Are the Asteroid" - here installed on Chicago's Navy Pier (video):
Reading
INSERT - For more on the hyperobject hiding at the heart of the comet/climate movie, you must read Ben Goldfarb's High Country News feature, "How do you make a movie about a hyperobject?" It includes a great interview with Adam McKay. Here's an excerpt:
“I think the hyperobject is what (the astronomers) confront, which is a massive, shifting system of careerism, profitization, politics and leveraged power,” McKay told me. “That’s what’s confusing and traumatizing.” Global warming is vast, yes, but its fundamental physics aren’t much more complex than a comet’s. The hyperobjects that animate the film, to McKay, aren’t geophysical entities — they’re capitalism, electoral politics and human psychology. “There are like 15 hyperobjects that all gather around the hyperobject of climate change,” McKay said.
When Manhattan Freeze Over - my 2004 story on "The Day After Tomorrow"
Introducing the Idea of ‘Hyperobjects’ - Timothy Morton in High Country News, Janury, 2015
“Who the F**k Cares About Adam McKay?” (We Do, and With Good Reason) - a profile of McKay by Joe Hagan in the November issue of Vanity Fair (I really enjoyed this piece)
How ‘Don’t Look Up’s Adam McKay Got Leo, JLaw, Streep, Chalamet, Rylance To Sound Climate Change Alarm With Comedy On Comet Hurtling To Earth - a really fascinating long interview with McKay by Mike Fleming Jr. in Deadline
Here are a couple of "Don't Look Up" reviews that bracket the range I've seen: Germain Lussier in Gizmodo sees the film as a "poignant, universal comedy" and Chris Evangelista, in /Film (a k a SlashFilm) calls it "a smug, shrill, obvious satire that has nothing to say other than 'Humanity is screwed'." (I loved this detail Evangelista noticed: "The only cameo that seems to work involves Chris Evans, playing a movie star who has adopted a 'both sides' approach to the comet; the type of person who says, 'Sure, the comet is bad. But ... maybe it's good, too?'")
So please do see the film and weigh in below with your reactions!
Parting shot
Comet Lovejoy photographed from the International Space Station by astronaut Dan Burbank, Dec. 21, 2011 (NASA)