Don't Look Up. A Critique of the Film and Some Thoughts Inspired by It.

I remember seeing disaster-from-above films like Deep Impact and Armageddon in the nineties.  They follow the same formula:  A comet or asteroid the size of (enter large body of real estate here) is going to collide with the Earth in (enter sliver of time before doomsday here).  The wise leader of the free world takes the helm as a small crew of plucky scientists / astronauts / oil riggers that crack wise as they set a nuclear or seismic whatchamacallit on said asteroid of comet to fragment it or vaporize it.  They avoid total devastation by the skin of their teeth.  Swell of inspirational music by Aerosmith or some other schmaltzy 70s rock act and roll credits.

In Don’t Look Up, I found myself laughing all the way to armageddon when I realized that the leader of the free world was asleep at the wheel.  Three scientists - heralds of doom - go unnoticed.  As for the general public, they bend where the winds of social media, algorithms, and trending topics blow.  At one moment, they are forced to face their own mortality.  At the  next moment, pop singer A breaks up with rapper B only to reconcile on the air, and all attention is fixed on them for fifteen minutes - fifteen minutes closer to the night of impact that at the beginning of the film is estimated to be five months and change.

We are a fickle species.  In the face of extinction level events like climate change or pandemics, we return to the pacifier of celebrity worship, demagogue worship, or just plain worship as if such rituals can banish the impending doom that we should be facing with sobriety and the hard work to either adapt to the new normal or find some miraculous means of reversing the effects.  I’m guilty of sticking my head in the sand as well as I wait for the next Star Wars streaming show to appear on Disney Plus.

On late night shows like Stephen Colbert, the host cracks wise with every report of a Near Earth Object missing us by a country mile.  I often ask myself:  How would a late night host and his captive studio audience react if a NEO was inevitably going to strike the earth to eliminate all life and that there was no avoiding it?  Would the band - led by Jean Baptiste - play on?  Would Colbert and his Late Night compatriots perform their schtick from the safety of their homes with a skeleton crew of camera, audio, and lights?  Or would our media circus finally wink off the air, with nothing to entertain us?

Suze compared the movie to other films depicting earth shaking importance such as Contact,  Network and Melancholia.  A friend drew a comparison to Dr. Strangelove.  All these films depict a human race incapable of comprehending or avoiding forces - both natural and manmade - that will steer our destinies towards terra incognita.

In reality, would we - homo sapiens sapiens - recognize a clear and present danger in the shape of a nickel and iron torpedo?  Would it be business as usual without a genuine care for our species, our world, or our legacy?

I’m gonna make this personal.  In the recent past, every time a potential pandemic threatened to wriggle its way through our borders, we quashed it.  I would heave a sigh of relief, but the uneasy thought scratched at the back of my head that next time - NEXT TIME - we wouldn’t be so lucky.

During December of 2019, my only concerns were the encroaching impeachment of then president Donald Trump and the season finale of The Mandalorian.  Between those two significant events, I caught notice on Twitter of a disease emerging from the Wuhan district of China that spread through the population at a geometric rate.  Nearly all cases of infection were fatal and what was worse, there was no vaccine to counteract the virus.

I said to myself, It would be only a matter of time before this coronavirus, this Covid-19 strain, would cross into our borders and the borders of all the countries of the world.  There would be no escape from it.  There would be no refuge from the spread of this pandemic.  Is this it?  Is this the big one?  Will it eliminate every last blessed man, woman and child as the biosphere decided to vaccinate itself from the spread of humanity once and for all?  How will I face my death?  How will I say goodbye to my beautiful wife?  How will I say goodbye to my ailing mother?   Will my immediate family somehow cheat death, or is there no bargaining with it?  How do I face my end?

With hindsight, in spite of the fatal end of many hundreds of thousands of people, the human race endured.  We developed vaccines and boosters that, on the whole, made us impervious to the virus.  There are still those who resort to ingesting horse dewormer or drinking their own piss as an alternative to the microchips that will be introduced to our bodies by the Fauci Ouchie.

So what’s my verdict of humanity’s flirtations with extinction?  I don’t think we can see five inches in front of our own faces, never mind a timeline towards the elimination of all life on earth.

Here endeth the sermon.

- JJB