'Don't Look Up' Is A Documentary
Image; Netflix
The political satire Don’t look Up (2021) is about a planet-killer comet headed for Earth, but it’s so much more than that. With the United States government choosing to downplay and ignore the existence of a comet that will wipe out all life on Earth in six months, it’s really about our society’s inability to handle systemic issues like climate change. The response to Comet Dibiasky (named after the women who discovered it) becomes bogged down with misinformation and a vapid media ecosystem which makes dealing with "negative" topics like humanity’s imminent death almost impossible.
So you know, exactly like real life.
There are a lot of good ideas brought up in this film, even if they do not always have the best execution. The writing can be brilliant at times, the acting is poignant, and the ending brought me to tears, as it viscerally shows the viewer everything we will lose if we do not fight for this planet. I genuinely love this movie, and I think you should watch it.
At its core is something we rarely see in cinema— a movie that not only skewers the types of people screwing over the planet but the systems that make real dissent difficult. We are directed to hate, not humanity as a whole, but the pundits, wealthy elite, and politicians preventing real change from being implemented, as well as the systems that empower them.
As a result, it creates a movie so emotionally impactful that it might as well be real.
The movie's central argument is that people don't listen to science because they are too wrapped up in toxic systems vying for their attention. "But it's all math," lead Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) says when his colleague Dr. Teddy Oglethrope (Rob Morgan) tells him to keep things simple on his media tour about the comet and to avoid boring the public with "the math." This simple, it's implied, seems to be part of the problem. As Mindy says in a riveting monologue directed at the American public:
“Would you please just stop being so f@cking pleasant? Im sorry but not everything needs to sound so goddamn clever or charming or likable all the time. Sometimes we need to just be able to say things to one another. We need to hear things….”
The world does not listen to Mindy and his colleague Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) because we would rather hear about celebrity breakups and sex scandals. Superficial concerns like these are a constant throughout the film, as personified by news anchors Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) and Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry), who would instead spin the end of the world as a neat science experiment than the cataclysm that it is. The movie ends with a white house staffer Jason Orlean (Jonah Hill), streaming that he is the last man on Earth, asking people to like and subscribe to his video even if no one is left. The movie argues that if the human race doesn't stop our obsession with these trivial things and start embracing the truth, then it will lead to our end.
Usually, this is where most movies would finish — blaming humanity as a whole for our vices (a damaging trope I have written about extensively elsewhere). Yet, Don't Look Up goes the extra mile by highlighting the systems that make it so difficult for people to listen to the truth (e.g., predatory capitalism and misinformation, etc.). The people we are directed to hate or not the public, but the power brokers acting in their own interests over the common good, and this nuance is what makes the film so realistic.
The film has an entire subplot about how the United States' Lauren Boebert-esk president Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) undermines our planet’s efforts to deflect the comet out of her own self-interest. She does this in part to appease a super donor in the vein of Elon Musk named Sir Peter Isherwell, (Mark Rylance), who wants to mine the comet to make cellphones. The two of them then spent their political capital convincing Americans that the jobs from the comet would end all poverty. The government seems more concerned with creating adverts that justify their decisions and hotlines that ease people’s discomfort than doing the difficult work of saving the world.
Given that we are, as of writing this, undergoing a pandemic worsened through neglect, incompetence, and greed, it's hard not to see this movie as anything less than an indictment of our present reality. Donald Trump killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in denying the disease's severity so that he could help his political chances. Bill Gates has probably killed millions by lobbying to keep the vaccine's IP in private hands. Millions have died to serve these interests, and the same thing will happen with climate change unless something radical is done very quickly.
Our planet dies in the film because of this selfishness from the powerful, not due to some Machiavellian plot. As Kate Dibiasky says of the powerful, "They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for." The movie’s rage is always directed at the rich, and it never lets up, not even at the end. Its second-to-last scene involves the wealthy survivors of our planet landing on a new world thousands of years in the future and immediately being killed off by aliens — unable to imagine that maybe they wouldn’t be at the top of the hierarchy wherever they went next.
And yet hundreds of recent movies have criticized the rich. What makes this movie strike such a chord is that it's not simply the rich who are to blame but the systems they benefit from as well. President Janie Orlean and CEO Peter Isherwell are two figures responding to clear incentives. Orlean wants to win reelection, so she initially denies the comet's existence because it will interfere with the midterms. Isherwell interrupts humanity's initial plan to destroy the comet because he wants the chance to mine the trillions of dollars in resources, even if his greed will potentially kill everyone.
No one is depicted as immune from these incentives, not even our protagonists. Near the end of the film, there is a concert they host where fake celebrity Riley Bina (Ariana Grande) sings about how everyone needs to embrace the science and "look up" at the comet — a meaningless statement harkening to the "science is real" slogan surrounding climate change. Our leads, Mindy and Dibiasky, are not trying to overthrow our corrupt political leaders as the world ends but are instead selling tickets to a concert. They have created a brand, nothing more. We hate rich assholes like Isherwell, but the film clarifies that they are part of a system that coopts all dissent, making our ability to handle systemic problems using legitimate tools next to impossible.
We come to understand as the viewer that the belief in science is never as simple as repeating "the math," something Don't Look Up highlights expertly. We see firsthand all the shortcuts and cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world as it is. In real life, the science of the day has been used to justify everything from eugenics to sexism to climate change denialism. This reality doesn't mean the scientific method is wrong or erroneous, but we must realize that how we interpret "the science" is always dictated by the politics of the time. Dr. Teddy Oglethrope is right. The story matters too, and those who simplify science to a slogan or hashtag ignore this critical dynamic.
They are also ignoring the dynamic of power by making the belief of science, math, or looking up at the comet a matter of virtue rather than one of force and violence. We do not always choose things freely but are made to, and science is no different, which, again, this movie demonstrates brilliantly. There is a running gag in the film where characters who step out of line have a bag placed over their heads and are disappeared to an off-grid location until they agree not to do media appearances (I promise, it's funnier than it sounds). We are meant to laugh during these moments, but, if anything, these bits are tame compared to what happens in real life. Those in power have done far worse to preserve the status quo. Entire governments have been toppled to secure mineral rights.
Why not the world?
Our belief systems are not always a matter of our personal choices but are often imposed on us through violence directed at us by the powerful. The violence and coercion shown in the film feel more emotionally accurate than any David and Goliath story in pop culture about rogue troublemakers triumphing over our system to save humanity. Real heroes rarely receive their day in the sun. They get a bag thrown over their heads, are tortured, exiled, or worse. They are also usually only recognized as heroes decades or centuries after the fact — if they are remembered at all.
In the end, the government’s plan to destroy the comet doesn’t fail because of the public but due to the whims of the powerful. Billionaire Isherwell is the primary person who scrubbed humanity’s best hope for survival, and it’s not out of any brilliant innovation, but because he’s just selfish and ignorant. He’s so stubborn that he fires all scientists who interfere with his mission because they tell him that his plan won’t work. He’d rather focus our survival on a plan that has less of a chance of working but will make him wealthier.
So you know, kind of like real life.
Don’t Look Up may be fiction, but it feels real. It feels like a documentary from both the future and now. Almost immediately, the same cycle of denialism and infotainment was replicated in the critical response to this film. When I look at the abysmal Rotten Tomatoes rating for this film, it’s fair to say that Don’t Look Up was not well received by critics (the public loves it, however, which is very ironic given the subject material of the press downplaying negative subjects). Many critics claimed that it ended up replicating the very aspects it was trying to criticize (i.e., creating very vapid and superficial entertainment) or, worst of all, was too earnest and blunt. As David Fear laments in the Rolling Stone:
“…[both leads] take turns channeling the voice of the movie’s creator, yelling and bellowing and losing their cool repeatedly over the fact that No. One. Seems. To. Get. It! We keep blowing whatever little chances we have to fix this. It’s a sentiment familiar to a lot of us, so much so that, at a certain point, you want to throttle this movie back and match it decibel for decibel: No. Need. To. Keep. Screaming. This. In. Our. Faces.”
Except, films about climate change sort of do have to be blunt, David.
Given that this film is talking indirectly about climate change denialism (a thing that also threatens our current civilization), being too direct might be impossible. If anything, it was not explicit enough. I watched this movie with my parents, and when I brought up how our planet is on a similar, albeit slightly longer, time-crunch, I was called too negative. And we see that response with a lot of the reporting in the movie. You know you've upset the right people when corporate-backed media is complaining about you being too negative about the impending collapse of modern civilization.
If anything, what this movie does wrong is not its directness or unpleasantness (I applaud it for those), but how it sometimes focuses too much on superficial symptoms like social media addiction or infotainment over their causes (i.e., capitalism, corruption, etc.). The world is not ending because we all are glued too much to our screens, but because powerful people hacked human psychology to make us all addicted to our phones so that we would be easier to control. There's a difference. We are not all destroying the world in equal measure. In fact, in our current system, most of us have very little say in policy at all, something the film highlights at every available opportunity.
Our protagonists tried their best to get the government to change course but ultimately failed because the rich and powerful have more say over our lives than we do, and that isn't right. I wept at this film's conclusion because if we don't do anything — if we do not tear down our predatory system of capitalism to the ground — its ending might as well be the final b-roll in a somber alien documentary about the once bright human race.
Our planet is dying. The question now becomes what you will do about it: continue to expect our leaders to do better or take the decision out of their hands?