The unexpected brilliance of Don’t Look Up

I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Don’t Look Up, the new satirical film on Netflix. It’s about a couple of American scientists who discover a giant ‘planet-killing’ comet that’s going to collide with Earth in just over six months. They try to warn the world about this existential threat but no one takes them seriously, from the President of the United States on down. Some people half- listen, but then get distracted by gossip or greed or lust, and when they do engage they come up with excuses, like pointing out the science is only 99.78 per cent certain, not 100 per cent, so why don’t we just ‘sit tight and assess’? Or maybe we can solve the problem with technology?

In case you haven’t got it yet, Don’t Look Up is an allegory about climate change, with a little bit of Covid denialism thrown in. Writer and director Adam McKay, whose last film was a vicious attack on Dick Cheney, believes we’re burying our heads in the sand when what we should be doing is paying attention to ‘the science’ before it’s too late. In other words, he’s from the Greta Thunberg school of environmental catastrophism. The correct response to the apocalyptic predictions being spat out by computer models, whether designed by epidemiologists or climate scientists, is to panic — big time.

Now, there are flaws in this analogy. Given how many times environmental activists have warned of imminent disaster — Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, said that if we didn’t mend our ways we’d disappear in a cloud of blue smoke by 1988 — it would be more accurate if the two scientists in Don’t Look Up had been telling us a comet was about to destroy our planet roughly once a year for the past 50 years.