Don't Look Up: The Lesson That Surrounds Our Lives
- Prisha Dayal
- Mar 4, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 7, 2022
One look up will take your breath away, but do you want to know the truth behind the stars? Some might question the strength of people who choose to hide from the truth while others say that lies can save people from a rotten road. In the new movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, Don’t Look Up interrogates this debate with a futuristic apocalypse set to end the world.
Kate Dibiasky, a Ph.D. candidate and low-level astronomer, discovers a ground-breaking comet heading directly towards Earth. This would be a celebratory accomplishment but the comet had bigger things in mind… way bigger. Due to the comet’s colossal size, when it would hit Earth in six months and fourteen days it was ready to destroy the entire planet, including everything on it. With the help of Dr. Randal Mindy, a fellow astronomer, Dibiasky prepares to warn the world about its death, starting with the President of the United States. After hours of waiting the astronomers and Dr. Oglethorpe, the head of Planetary Defense Coordination Office, are able to warn President Orlean about this incoming comet. However, their words seemed to be a wasted effort as they got utter indifference (as well as multiple rude jokes) from the president and her son, Jason. She shoves them off and reminds them of the center of her focus, elections, and that since these words were coming from low-level astronomers, they weren’t worth her time. In absolute shock and despair from this response, Kate and Randal took to the media in aspirations that society would resonate in their well-reasoned panic. But they forgot they were putting their hope in the media, our media. After a raging temper tantrum in front of the world while being interviewed for a talk show, Kate was turned into a meme. However, Dr. Mindy was invited to continue talking about the comet and was most popularly labeled AILF (which meant Astronomer I’d Like to… well you know). Although the names of the two scientists continued to buzz people’s screens, society was consumed by foolishness and paid little attention to the actual comet. Meanwhile, President Orlean was facing trouble with her polls as a leak of her affair surfaced on the internet. She then decides to retrieve the two astronomers and advertise the comet as a way to earn more votes. With this newfound popularity, they were able to commence a space mission that was proof-read and planned to destroy the comet, but the mission was called off at the very last minute. This was because Peter Isherwell, a tech giant and CEO of BASH, found that the comet carried a vast amount of minerals that were extreme money-making materials. To reason this with the public, Isherwell says that the money from the comet could help to create many jobs. With the help of the vogue Dr. Mindy, who split with Dibiasky due to her public image, the President joined BASH to start a new space mission. However, once Dr. Mindy realizes that there was barely any thought in the plan and that it was going to fail, he leaves. They continue the mission while Randal and Kate start a revolution called “Just Look Up” to help people see that the comet is real, and they have to do something about it. However, the president starts a counter-revolt called “Don’t Look Up” claiming that the other side just wants to create unnecessary fear and panic in the world, but really it was so that they could take the money made from the minerals. Even with the help of loved celebrities such as Riley Bina, Just Look Up failed, it was too late and the second mission took place. The second mission failed… the world ended… it was too late.
I would give this movie 4/5 stars. Although I thought the overall lesson and plot were good, it didn’t entirely come through with cinematics. However, other people might think my personal rating is generous. The reason why people are hating on it is because the satire is too blunt, but that is really a cover-up for saying “it is satire that feels almost too close to reality” and this scares people. Not only are reviewers being heavily deviated from the actual hard point of the movie but they are degrading it for its lack of sensitivity. The truth is, there is no sensitive way to put this message anymore, the movie is serving us a wake-up call for going too long in trying to word the world’s problems in the most sugar-coated way possible (which, by the way, has simply caused more political problems). These critics are participating in the exact problem the movie is warning us about: our society running away from our problems.
This is the one thing our world has never learned to solve. We’ve seen it time and time again: the Holocaust, Rwandan Genocide, and our most recent, COVID - 19. What does this have in common? People lying to themselves creates a dangerous game that ends up with people believing their own lies to seek comfort. In the case of the genocides, no one acted when people first heard the warnings of racial agonies and once the ethnic cleansing was clear to see, it was too late. Propaganda fed their white-lies-seeking minds after the warnings created a stressful environment. COVID-19 is the most similar example to the movie. People aren’t taking things seriously, from conspiracy theories over the vaccine (similar to those made in Don’t Look Up over the comet) to political conflict over something that was meant to be health and science-related (similar to the Presidential campaigns at the end of the movie), people are running away from the warning signs. Our society has been misleading itself and lost most of its sense of seriousness. One word can be so influential but only if people want to believe in it. Even then, people only believe what they want to hear, which in everyone’s defense, is the natural way and it’s also how we form opinions. I am not saying that I am exempt from this, everyone has done this at some point in time, and it isn’t always a bad thing. This can be used to raise awareness of a problem or to spread important information. However, Don’t Look Up looks into the negatives of our laziness as we begin to give up on ourselves and any hope we have of helping the world, especially after our planet has been scarred by so much. As the Sydney Morning Herald says, the boulders between us and action include “duplicitous political leaders more worried about the next election than an extinction event; their cynical and self-serving staff and functionaries; those media organizations that are more interested in facile entertainment than truth; and social media tycoons who only feign interest in the greater good.” We can say that the venture to make society better is hopeless, and society would be with that. Little white lies are ok when trying to maintain someone’s happiness, but when people take it to the next level to determine life and death, it can be catastrophic.
Things like this newspaper, although small, gives us an outlet to express our opinions and let our voices be heard. These small actions might just be the way we can survive.
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