Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Don't Look Up
Director Adam McKay's hit Don’t Look Up is theoretically about the danger posed by an errant comet and humanity’s indifference toward the threat, but the divisive satire is about much more than that—which might explain the polarized critical responses to the Netflix hit. Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay had a clear and unabashed agenda when creating the 2021 political satire. The Netflix comedy was intended to illustrate the world’s reaction to climate change through a story of a comet threatening life on earth and a pair of scientists desperately attempting to inform a seemingly complacent population about this.
Unlike self-described “pandemic movies” such as Aaron Sorkin, Adam McKay makes no secret of his political beliefs and the way they inform his writing and direction, but it is nonetheless striking to see the story of two scientists having their words warped by a duplicitous media, power-hungry amoral politicians, and thoughtless social media moguls reflect reality more than any COVID-19-centric movie has so far.
Related: Don't Look Up Cast & Character Guide
However, for all the overt echoes with the current climate crisis, the combination of Don’t Look Up’s acerbic commentary on the news media, the movie’s uncompromising dismissal of politicians, and its stark depiction of an uncaring world feeling powerless in the face of disaster mean the hit can be read as more than just a climate change allegory. As proven by comparing Don’t Look Up and Midnight Mass’s endings, McKay’s satire is as much about how the contemporary US political establishment and media react to a crisis than any specific crisis itself. As a result, despite never mentioning the issue by name, Don’t Look Up is unintentionally the best movie about the pandemic so far.
Don’t Look Up’s Climate Change Allegory Explained
The bulk of Don’t Look Up’s story sees two scientists, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Randall and Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate, desperately trying to warn the world about an impending ecological catastrophe, only to be met with indifference by politicians and obfuscation by a media more interested in misleading than informing. It is very clearly intended to be a movie about the climate crisis (with co-writer Dave Sirota taking to Twitter to call Don’t Look Up a “climate movie” shortly after its release). However, much like Rick & Morty’s early pandemic satire ended up proving more prescient than the creators could possible have predicted when the episode aired, Don’t Look Up’s allegory functions even better as a stand-in for COVID upon the movie’s late 2021 release.
How Don’t Look Up (Accidentally) Captured 2021’s Zeitgeist
The way in which Don’t Look Up’s heroes are treated by both the media and politicians they encounter, both of whom try to talk down the threat and avoid any action, will be familiar to viewers who have seen experts struggle to have their voices heard in the last two years. What seem like common sense solutions (destroying the comet) give way to more exploitative options (mining it for minerals) and eventually absurdity (denying its existence). In this way, much like a live-action South Park, Don’t Look Up’s metaphor-driven story mirrors the way in which public conversation early on in the pandemic was moved from rent freezes, eviction moratoriums, and universal basic income, to a dependence on masks and on-again, off-again lockdowns alone, to eventually COVID denialism and anti-vaccine panic.
Don’t Look Up’s Social Media Satire Works For Any Topic
While most modern satires spare at least some of their ire for social media, the attention-sapping scourge of many contemporary creators, Don’t Look Up has a specific take on the phenomenon and its socio-cultural impact that is as relevant to COVID-19 as it is to an impending comet. The way in which social media leads public reaction to become more vitriolic and divisive, even when faced with an obvious existential threat that has no “two sides,” fits the COVID-19 pandemic perfectly. Like a more focused Black Mirror, Don’t Look Up’s sci-fi-inflected satire of social media primarily underlines the reality that algorithms are designed to fuel engagement and therefore encourage constant conflict. As such, even though the pandemic and the comet both seem like obvious, impossible-to-deny threats, in both McKay’s movie and reality, significant portions of social media are dedicated to disproving their very existence rather than searching for solutions.
Will Don’t Look Up Be A True Story (Can It Be Avoided)?
However, the primary way in which Don’t Look Up’s satire does not directly track as commentary on the ongoing pandemic is also about the most hopeful element of the Netflix hit. In the case of a comet hurtling toward earth, civilization only has one opportunity to band together and handle the crisis—resulting in mass extinction when they fail to act. However, where Don’t Look Up avoids the overwhelming bleakness of Dr. Strangelove is in the reassuring reality that the pandemic offers each country, each community, and each individual numerous opportunities to react and will not doom the planet’s entire population (save for the uber-rich elites in cryo-sleep) in an instant if mishandled.
As a result, Don’t Look Up is both an acerbic commentary on the failures of politicians and the media in their initial reaction to public crises and a call to action for the public to demand more than platitudes and empty gestures from them going forward. McKay’s movie may have earned a lot of negative reviews, but many of the critics taking umbrage with its anger fail to note that Don’t Look Up doesn’t typically lay the blame for the crisis on the masses but rather on elites and their collective decision to avoid action despite its disastrous consequences. As a result, Don’t Look Up ends up being a more rousing reflection on both the pandemic and the climate crisis than a hopeless screed.
