Hey readers,
Don’t Look Up, the filmmaker Adam McKay’s dark satire about humanity’s efforts to deflect a comet that’s going to destroy us all, is — at least according to my social media — either one of the most important movies ever or so bad as to be nearly unwatchable. (Reviews are similarly split: The film currently has a 55 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, though Netflix has reported that Don’t Look Up recorded more than 152 million viewing hours for the week of December 27, the most in the platform’s history.)
A lot of this comes down to what you think of the movie’s politics, which are rather confused for a film that was made with the explicit political aim of encouraging viewers to take climate change seriously — as many, many critics have already noted.
As New York magazine’s Eric Levitz has pointed out, the movie doesn’t really work at all as an allegory for the long-term threat of climate change, which is very unlike a comet that will leave no survivors if we don’t nuke it in the next six months. And while the movie takes a brave, Covid-inspired stab at commenting on our information ecosystem, it doesn’t quite know what it wants to say about that either.
But the film’s approach, as my former colleague Matt Yglesias observed, works incredibly well as an allegory for actual comets, or for supervolcanic eruptions, or for transformative AI or engineered pandemics, or for anything else that really might abruptly end humanity — and which might well get you laughed off daytime TV for freaking out about them, as happens to the protagonists in one of Don’t Look Up’s best-crafted scenes.
However, there’s another element of what Don’t Look Up has to say that has been somewhat neglected in the conversation about it, probably because talking about it at all involves massive spoilers.
Be warned: From here, I’m going to tell you exactly how this movie ends.
Don’t Look Up on what it means to lose
Everybody dies, and humanity is wiped out.
Technically, that’s not quite guaranteed from what we see: A small spaceship escapes with some unsympathetic rich people who survive in stasis, and they successfully make it 20,000 years later to another planet (where they’re immediately eaten by some hostile local megafauna). And in a post-credits scene, the president’s even more unsympathetic dumbass son (Jonah Hill), somehow having survived the impact, starts drafting a social media post in the shattered world. Those were two of my least favorite scenes, because to my mind they interfere with the one place where Don’t Look Up has real gravity and real emotional resonance.
The apocalyptic disaster movie — think I Am Legend, Independence Day, 2012, War of the Worlds — has its conventions. The hero starts out as an ordinary family man (and yes, it’s almost always a man), but when circumstances demand it, he realizes he has something more than the ordinary inside him. The fate of the world rests on his shoulders, and he’ll save it, or at least salvage something of it for the survivors and the people he loves.
It’s very clearly this genre that Don’t Look Up is in dialogue with, especially in DiCaprio’s plot: he begins as an awkward astronomy professor and becomes the face of the comet revelation. Seduced by power and fame, he betrays his wife, and as the world comes to an end he realizes what really matters, making a pilgrimage home to reunite with his family and face his mistakes.
It’s similar to the arc of John Cusack in 2012, who reconciles with his ex as the floods begin to recede, with notes of Tom Cruise’s joyful reunion with his family at the end of War of the Worlds. The apocalypse, in this genre convention, is a backdrop for men to realize their mettle, put aside childish things, save their families, save the world, and then choose to live and love in it.
At the end of Don’t Look Up, the sympathetic characters gather around the dinner table and share memories and prayer and family jokes. DiCaprio wins his wife’s forgiveness and gruffly greets his adult children.
And then he, and they, die — along with the rest of us.
It’s the most serious thing the movie has to say; there are no interjections of the usual Adam McKay silliness interwoven elsewhere. Don’t Look Up isn’t about ordinary people who discover inside them the heroism to save the ones they love. It’s about ordinary people who know what’s coming and aren’t ultimately heroes at all. They make a couple of futile attempts to do something, which amount to nothing. And then they die, because that’s what will happen if we aren’t up to the task ahead of us.
We're not prepared for existential risk
There probably isn’t a comet coming, though with more surveillance we could be a whole lot more secure. But a lot of people who work on existential risks — threats that might plausibly destroy our world — believe that this century will be the most dangerous one in human history. Emerging technologies like AI and synthetic biology make it easier than ever to inadvertently create threats to the entire human species.
Our existing mechanisms for responding to pandemics, let alone to risks we’ve never imagined, aren’t good enough. The power of love won’t preserve the world. There are no adults in the room, and if we don’t become them — and maybe even if we do become them — we will die, and everyone will die, and it might be that we’ll die so completely that nothing will ever grow in the ashes, losing not just our present but all the future anyone might otherwise enjoy.
As I wrote these words — and as I watched this film — I felt myself flinching away. I don’t want to believe that. I want to believe that everything’s going to turn out okay, that the worst possible outcome can’t actually really happen, for real.
I felt suddenly aware of how often I refuse to glance up at the metaphorical sky lest there’s a comet there, refuse to pick up Toby Ord’s The Precipice, the seminal book on existential risk, lest its pages reveal a danger bearing down on our civilization that no heroes lie in waiting to save us from. (Spoiler: The book does, indeed, reveal a whole bunch of them, and argues there is a one-in-six chance one will destroy us this century.)
Don’t Look Up mostly doesn’t know exactly what it’s trying to say. But it knows this, and it captures it perfectly: Humanity is on track to make mistakes we can’t recover from, and we don’t want to look at that, and we don’t know what to do even when we see it.
—Kelsey Piper, @kelseytuoc
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