Don’t Look Up: four climate experts on the polarising disaster film
Critics haven’t been kind to Adam McKay’s eco-satire, but many climate experts are lauding it. Here four give their views
Rarely has a film been as divisive as Adam McKay’s climate satire Don’t Look Up. Although it has been watched by millions, and is already Netflix’s third most watched film ever, the response from critics was largely negative. Many found its story of scientists who discover an asteroid heading for Earth a clumsy allegory for the climate crisis, while others just found it boring. But many in the climate movement have praised the film, and audience reviews have been generally positive.
We asked four climate experts to give their views on the film. Warning: spoilers ahead.
Ketan Joshi: ‘The main character of the climate crisis is absent’
The starkest thing about Don’t Look Up is the sheer depth of the emotional significance it has for the folks who’ve been in the trenches of the climate fight for a long time. They’ve encountered decades of madness, as their warnings were twisted, ignored, denied and downplayed by politicians, media and devious industry players. Those people feel intense catharsis when they watch this film. It is not a great film, but to release that painful pressure valve, it doesn’t need to be.
Regardless, we have to engage with the deeper flaws of this film. It’s a massive hit, widely viewed across the world. It matters then that in attempting to hold a mirror up to humanity’s response to the climate crisis, it has strange priorities.
Weirdly absent from the film is a clear analogue of the fossil fuel industry (Rylance’s techy disaster capitalist wants to exploit the mineral wealth of the comet, but he isn’t piloting the asteroid for profit). Considering the film is touted as holding up a “devastating mirror”, the absence of the main character of the climate crisis is unforgivable. Similarly, the toxicity of the fossil industry’s impact across both sides of politics would have been a richer, funnier and more accurately reflective approach. The Trump satire falls flat.
The void left by the fossil industry is filled with strange choices. Media misreporting is mostly put down to air-headed morning show fluff, but in reality, journalism’s most deadly failures on climate come down to false balance (which features only briefly), or energised disinformation (there’s no News Corp analogue here, extra weird considering McKay’s EP role on the very funny, Murdoch-inspired Succession).
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