Don't Look Up

A film that opens with an astronomy student finding a comet. Kate makes the discovery. Her supervisor Randall calculates the orbit and the result is plain: the object will hit Earth within six months and end the planet. They go to the White House. The president asks about the election calendar and decides to hold the news. They go on television. A morning programme squeezes the story between two funny guests and the presenters laugh it off. Kate shouts and becomes a joke online. From there the film turns into a campaign. The government plans an intervention, then a technology magnate intervenes; the object contains valuable minerals and the plan is cancelled. What the narrative is interested in is not the comet but attention: the film describes an order in which evidence is not enough and how a matter is packaged decides everything. The slogan line is the centre of it. A group refuses to look at the sky and that becomes an identity. The tone is satirical and very direct in places; the film does not hide what it means, which is its most criticised feature. The last dinner scene changes the tone at once and ends quietly. It was shot in the middle of the pandemic and was read as an analogy for the argument about climate; the director confirmed that. Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance, Jonah Hill and Timothée Chalamet are in the cast. Adam McKay wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes hard satire and crowded casts. Who it is not for: anyone looking for subtlety; the film states its argument over and over and runs long.