Don't Look Up

 

What better way to spend your Boxing Day than helping the Christmas dinner go down by relaxing and watching a movie. One you might consider is Don't Look Up. It is a satirical black comedy about the end of the world... and that's an intriguing summary! It is also highly misanthropic. At the end one gets a distinct impression that justice has been done. A pair of astronomers make an alarming discovery; a comet bigger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs is heading towards the earth. They immediately try to alert the authorities and the media, but are met with a baffling indifference. The whole doomsday situation is turned into another piece of light entertainment, alongside the political scandals and celebrity gossip. Social media treats it all as a giant meme factory. Spoilt and arrogant pop music starlets sing cringy songs about it. The main point of contact in the authorities is the President of the United States, played brilliantly by Meryl Streep, a role she excels at. Her name is Janie Orlean and she is a thinly disguised parody of Hillary Clinton. She is eventually only persuaded to react because she sees it as advantageous for victory in the mid-term elections. Finally, after a lot of persuasion and dithering, NASA begins to plan a near-earth object deflection operation. This can be done with unmanned vehicles, but Orlean insists she sends up an astronaut, a hard-bitten old war dog called Benedict Drask, another excellent characterization and performance by Ron Perlman. She has decided the mission needs a "hero!" for publicity purposes. However it is aborted at the last minute when valuable minerals are detected inside the comet. Instead an elderly computer nerd with a touch of dementia called Sir Peter Isherwell is brought in with a harebrained and reckless scheme to break the asteroid up into smaller pieces and land them gently on the earth. The lack of privacy in a Big Brother society is illustrated well when he says to one of the other characters: "I know what you are! My algorithms have identified forty million data points on every decision you have made since 1994. I know when you have colon polyps before your doctor does. You are a lifestyle idealist in my eight different consumer profile types." It is somewhat reminiscent of Adam Curtis' documentaries. The plan that forfeits the safety of the earth to access the commodity wealth of the comet, of course, fails abysmally; as it could not otherwise do with such incompetent executors. In the final scene, when a survivor crawls out from under the burning rubble of the world's cities, he takes a selfie with his mobile phone and cries out in delight. "I'm the last man left on earth. Like, share and subscribe!" The president and a few of her underlings manage to flee the doomed earth, but I'm pleased to say she also comes to a gruesome and utterly hilarious demise; and it was one predicted by Isherwood's algorithms. See here for the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbIxYm3mKzI.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2016/10/hypernormalisation.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2021/08/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-part-6_13.html.