“DON’T LOOK UP!”

NOVEMBER 13, 2022 – Yesterday, heading out on my walk, I encountered our neighbors Kate and Dave across the alley. We hadn’t chatted in a while, so I stopped to talk. They’re smart, bright, articulate, well-informed and invariably have something worthwhile to hear. Among yesterday’s takes-away was a film recommendation: Don’t Look Up, on Netflix. Beth and I watched it yesterday evening.

Written, produced and directed by Adam McKay and starring DiCaprio, Streep, Blanchett and Jennifer Lawrence, Don’t Look Up satirizes denialism, Trumpism, political corruption, entertainment media, pop-celebrity, the Ivy League, non-experts in positions of power and hyper-steroidal eccentro-capitalism.

The film revolves around an extinction threat by a comet aiming for earth. When two Michigan State astronomers discover the celestial missile, they sound the alarm, but their apocalyptic warning falls on skeptical ears. When the evidence becomes inescapable, a plan is devised to use nuclear-armed rockets to blow up the five-mile-wide stone. The president leverages the effort to boost her scandal-induced plunge in ratings. Soon after blast-off, however, she orders cancellation: her biggest donor—an Elon Musk figure—convinces her that the minerals-rich comet can be pulverized in space and the fragments then exploited commercially to the tune of 140 trillion.

Public opinion splits between the doomsday folks (“Look up!”) and people who deny the comet (“Don’t Look Up!”) or alternatively—think it’s a hyper-El Dorado.

Spoiler alert: the Muskian venture is a bust and life on earth is destroyed but not before the unattractively buck-naked 0.1% escape to an alternative planetary paradise . . . inhabited, as luck has it, by beautiful, carnivorous dinosaurian birds whose first victim is . . . the newly arrived American president.

I enjoyed the film and laughed out loud continually—a lot more than Beth, but I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t snoozing through some of the better scenes. McKay’s work has met with mixed reviews by the critics class. Climate scientists applaud it. Humorless environmental activists complain that it over-trivializes. (I say, worthy is any method that draws highlights the biggest issue of all-time.) Republicans, also humorless, blast the film as another example of radical, leftist, socialist, alarmist nonsense—mainly because it parodies denialist-politics and capitalism run rampant.

My criticism of the criticisms is that they are humorless and miss the whole point of the film. What better way to knock people over the head than to . . . knock them over the head? Otherwise, we’re (1) frogs in a pot of boiling water; (2) DIY homeowners who never fix the hole in the roof because when it’s not raining, no harm, no foul, but when it is raining, that’s no time to be on a slippery roof trying to repair it; or (3) incorrigible can-kickers more concerned about the cost of driving our SUVs than we are about driving ourselves to extinction.

Knowing in your heart of hearts that Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover were right—Hollywood is run by Communists—your political disposition matters not: if you’re an observer of current events and have a sense of humor, Don’t Look Up is your kind of movie, especially with a beer and large bowl of buttered popcorn.

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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson