Don't look up

Don’t Look Up, or better yet: Fuck it, we’re all gonna die.
The movie is like some kind of Wittgensteinian torture, set in the age of post-truth—where words don’t matter, reality is distorted, and everything gets twisted to fit an agenda.
It feels like the movie was probably written before COVID and then adapted on the fly. After all, Meryl Streep plays a female Donald Trump, Jonah Hill (in top form) is a parody of Ivanka Trump, and Mark Rylance channels a very obvious Elon Musk.
I think the director of The Big Short originally set out to roast Musk’s grand plans to colonize Mars while the planet we’re on remains a tough place to live.
In my view, it’s not really a critique of the capitalist system, but more about the vanity of focusing the sharpest minds on projects that don’t serve 99.9% of humanity. It also highlights how politicians are utterly incapable of coming up with solutions or actually doing politics.
Beyond that, DiCaprio gives a knockout performance in a role that lets us feel the rollercoaster scientists have been on during the pandemic. We see how scientists became the stars of the moment, pulled out of obscurity, only to realize that if they don’t align with the current narrative, they can easily be sidelined. We’ve seen it here too—scientific expertise isn’t enough; political alignment is required as well.
The fast-paced, documentary-like style with a bunch of celebrities (e.g., Ariana Grande), which some boomers dismissed as low-brow or anti-festival, reminded me of the hilarious Death to 2021 on Netflix (check it out). This generational gap is real, folks—people are gonna get lost in it.

Some people did not take it seriously because it’s on Netflix, but that’s too easy of a critique. They forget that real mass appeal happens where the people are, not in elitist collectives (though those have their place too).
Personally, I found the movie clever. It moved me, shook me up, made me text a bunch of friends telling them to watch it immediately. In just two hours, it helped me cut through the noise of media-driven narratives and connect with people about the real issues we’re living through.
For the finale, I saved my personal favorite moment: when Chalamet kisses Lawrence as she’s explaining how corrupt the system is and everything she’s been through trying to convey the scientific truth about the comet. She stops him, thinking the move is completely irrelevant given the seriousness of the situation.

But then, she jumps on him and starts kissing him back, dropping a line that, in my opinion, sums up the main message of the movie, and maybe even the whole era: Fuck it, we’re all gonna die.

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