Released in the midst of a pandemic, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up delivers a cynically comedic story about a comet, the planet it promises to destroy, and humanity’s wholly indifferent response to the oncoming crisis. While the film quickly climbed the Netflix charts, becoming the second-most-viewed movie in the streaming site’s history, it received mixed reactions from critics and audiences alike for its attempt at climate change advocacy. 

The movie follows Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student who discovers a comet en route to destroy the Earth. Dibiasky and her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), make several attempts to bring the comet to the world’s attention, but when both petitioning the White House to take action and sitting on a national news show to bring awareness fail, they are struck with the reality that barely anyone believes in the comet’s risk, let alone wants to take action to prevent the incoming disaster. Grappling with their own waning hope in humanity, their ardent pleas for Washington to deflect the comet off course are ultimately defeated by the government’s higher priority: the potential to extract trillions of dollars worth of resources from the comet upon impact through a partnership with the tech company BASH. This lucrative incentive persuades President Orlean (Meryl Streep) to call off a prepared mission to deflect the comet, despite the lack of scientific backing to this decision. Despite the best efforts of Kate and Dr. Mindy urging people to “just look up” and acknowledge the comet’s threat as it moves closer and closer to Earth, last ditch movements to mobilize and deflect the comet are too little too late. Humanity’s last chance at survival rests in the avaricious hands of an inept president and a selfish billionaire. It fails. With President Orlean and BASH CEO Peter Isherwell (Mark Ryland) realizing their doom, they use their last hour alive to abandon a panicked and praying humanity and board a spaceship with America’s wealthy elite. The comet strikes. The credits play. And Don’t Look Up’s last scenes of our heroes’ defeat and Earth’s ruination provide a sobering end to an otherwise comedic satire…that is, until it becomes obvious that there is still a few minutes left of runtime, and the true ending scenes are revealed. 

The words “climate change” are never said throughout the entire movie, but its narrative of an apathetic humanity’s reaction (or lack thereof) to an existential threat strikes very intentional parallels to the climate crisis facing Earth today: scientists in alarm are told to “sit back and assess,” and a news outlet covering the end of the world becomes more distracted by celebrity relationships. Sensationalism, or the act of conveying a message in a dramatic or exciting way at the expense of integrity, is both critiqued and practiced by Don’t Look Up. For example, one of the movie’s major themes is the indict of “Big Tech” through the fictional company BASH, whose CEO convinces a foolhardy president to call off what would have been humanity’s salvation. Don’t Look Up argues that technology is not always to be trusted, citing the manipulative way algorithms use user data and the selfish intentions of the billionaires who wrote their codes. 

Adam McKay intentionally co-wrote Don’t Look Up to be a climate change allegory in what McKay calls a “Clark Kent disguise.” However, this raises the question of what kind of awareness a movie can bring to a cause that it never directly addresses. As a matter of fact, one major critique of the film is by climate activists who believe this “disguise” is far too effective; while many people are able to recognize the metaphor, an equal number of people less familiar with the climate crisis see it as nothing more than a sardonic movie about an entirely hypothetical asteroid. Others critique the choice of using the comet allegory at all. A comet is a case of all-or-nothing devastation: there is a hard deadline, and a clear, immediate indicator of success or failure in deterring the crisis. Climate change, on the other hand, is not an incoming disaster but an ongoing one, and there is no telling whether we reach the point of no return in ten years or tomorrow. The world’s end will not come in a grand, earth-shattering explosion, but gradually, as the sea level rises in centimeters, not miles, and a series of small disasters that eventually becomes an undeniable catastrophe.If nothing else, Don’t Look Up is an entertaining satire of a world facing existential crisis. The movie is far from worthless in its mission in climate change advocacy, as even the writing of critical articles like these bring even a modicum of awareness. However, for a film that critiques the sensationalization of urgent crises, and the failure of the government and the media alike to reflect said needed urgency, Don’t Look Up’s attempt at climate advocacy, in many ways, digs its own grave. In its strike against climate crisis complacency, it’s a softened blow. And as Kate Dibiasky snaps on the fictitious news show The Daily Rip, “Maybe the destruction of the entire planet isn’t supposed to be fun. Maybe it’s supposed to be terrifying.”