The Most Depressing Thing About Don’t Look Up (Isn’t What You Think)
Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s star-studded Netflix satire about scientists desperately (and unsuccessfully) attempting to warn a jaded and deeply compromised world about the imminent arrival of an extinction-level comet, has already garnered a veritable encyclopedia of hot takes. But as best as I can see, none of them have so far specifically been about what is the most depressing thing about what is a deeply depressing film.
(Also: spoilers are coming, obviously, heaps of them. Don’t look down.)
That’s despite the fact that there are many, many depressing things about Don’t Look Up, starting with its entire premise. But the most depressing aspect, for my money, isn’t that it concludes with the utter destruction of human civilisation and the deaths of billions of human beings.
Nor is it the way that everyone, from Leonardo di Caprio’s newly-famous scientist Dr Randall Mindy to the MAGA-like “Don’t Look Up” crowd, realise too late that they’ve been manipulated to literal death by the media and powerful political and economic interests. Or even smaller moments, like when Kate Dibiaski (Jennifer Lawrence) accepts a marriage proposal knowing that it won’t matter in the slightest because they’re all about to die. Or the way that Mindy sadly smiles as he delivers the film’s most…
