We watched Don't Look Up on Netflix last night. The movie has gotten a lot of buzz since its release in December and deservedly so. It's a biting satire, which if some of the reviews are any indication, left some reviewers bleeding. It's not subtle, and it's very funny, but it's the type of humour that can make you wince. I liked it a lot.
Although the disaster in the movie is a comet impact, the response to the news is clearly an allegory about our current climate disaster. In The Guardian, Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution, explores this in more detail.
The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. And climate scientists have faced an even more insurmountable public communication task than the astronomers in Don’t Look Up, since climate destruction unfolds over decades – lightning fast as far as the planet is concerned, but glacially slow as far as the news cycle is concerned – and isn’t as immediate and visible as a comet in the sky.
Given all this, dismissing Don’t Look Up as too obvious might say more about the critic than the film. It’s funny and terrifying because it conveys a certain cold truth that climate scientists and others who understand the full depth of the climate emergency are living every day. I hope that this movie, which comically depicts how hard it is to break through prevailing norms, actually helps break through those norms in real life.
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