‘Don’t Look Up’ : Our take on the movie

Breaking Netflix records, Adam McKay’s latest film, Don’t Look Up, depicts scientists’ warning of an imminent meteor strike on Earth, presenting an extinction-level threat. Within its first 28 days of release, Don’t Look Up had racked up an incredible 350 million hours of viewing time – the second-most of any film on Netflix so far.

As many commentators have pointed out, the core message of Don’t Look Up isn’t actually about a meteor strike, it’s about climate change. 

So, we chatted to members of the Ecologi team to hear their thoughts about the movie.

Working in the climate space, many members of the Ecologi team watched Don’t Look Up with some trepidation; would our own personal experiences of struggling to communicate the seriousness of climate change be reflected in the film? The answer, it turned out, was an emphatic ‘yes’.

Don’t Look Up is a parody of reality, but it definitely wasn’t the laugh-a-minute experience one often expects of a parody – at least not for the Ecologi team. Alex, one of our Senior Developers, remarked right away that he found it “a hard watch”, and Paula, our Senior Finance Manager, said that parts of the film made her feel “uncomfortable and anxious because it shone a light on the reality that is climate denial”.

Matt, one of our Product Managers, summed up how impactful the film was, saying he found himself “going from seeing clearly the synonymity with the climate emergency, then getting immersed in the film, then bang, back to seeing clearly again. The power was in having this realisation over and over during the film. It was like a rollercoaster ride.” 

Sam, our Climate Impact Manager, noted that “not all ‘climate denial’ is as clear-cut as abject denial of human-caused climate change. Often, responses to our concerns about warming are heard and understood – even by family members or friends – but then, nothing happens. Their perceptions and behaviour don’t really change. For me, that can be a form of denial too.”

The stark contrast between the response of people working in the climate sector and people who are less involved in climate work was made clear in one of Netflix’s promotional posters for the film. While one representative from the American Film Institute described the film as “a screamingly funny action film”, climate scientist Peter Kalmus echoed our team’s responses, describing the film as “the most accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve seen”.

Don’t Look Up satirises power and politics through a populist US President character, portrayed by Meryl Streep, a Bezos-Zuckerberg-Musk-esque tech billionaire character (Mark Rylance), and two overly-manufactured media personalities on a daily talk show, The Daily Rip (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry). Whilst there are certainly no prizes for guessing who Meryl Streep’s character is based on – with her three-word catchphrases and nepotistic White House hiring practices – there is more nuanced commentary than simply political caricaturisation taking place.

Sam, our Climate Impact Manager, said “One of the great challenges in climate action, and one of the key drivers of the ‘knowledge-action gap’ – which we see when our politicians understand climate change but do nothing substantial about it – is political short-termism. When political time horizons extend only as far as the next election cycle, candidates resort to cheap slogans and insubstantial policies which don’t even try to address more long term issues, like climate and ecological breakdown.” 

Regarding the media, the climate community has felt seen by the cringeworthy interactions between Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence (the concerned scientists) and their contemporaries in power and in the media.

Sam continued, “The dynamic on the talk show satirises a very real trend in coverage of climate change, which is that for over 40 years the media has spectacularly failed to deliver key messages on climate in the service of either ‘balance’ (where climate deniers are given equal priority to climate experts) or ‘entertainment’ (where the gravity of climate change is trivialised or diminished).”

The verdict from our team was that Don’t Look Up does well to capture typical human responses to learning of imminent existential threats, such as reacting with disbelief, humour or avoidance. We’ve all seen these emotions and reactions in friends and family members, not to mention politicians and people with the power to change our trajectory – and have even gone through many of these stages ourselves. 

As we try to help others understand the threats posed by climate change in the hope of bringing about change, responses such as “don’t be so dramatic” or “it can’t possibly be that bad” are all too familiar. Accusations of hysteria are also all too common, especially targeted towards prominent young female activists such as Greta Thunberg. This was perfectly portrayed in the film when even high-level scientists and experts responded to news of an imminent extinction-level event by saying “let’s not be dramatic here” and “let’s all calm down”! 

Abi, our Marketing Manager, said that, “The main point that really struck me throughout the film was disbelief. We know that there is a climate crisis, the science is there, but it comes down to humanity’s ability to emotionally comprehend the effects on their own lives that is really the deeper issue.” Despite the clear and overwhelming evidence and scientific consensus about climate change and our role in causing it, the frustration that the scientists – DiCaprio and Lawrence – felt is something lots of us can relate to. Matt, one of our Product Managers, pointed out just “how ridiculous the responses and reactions were to the situation”, and that, because of this, the film makes it “hard not to stop and think”.

Even when protestors in Don’t Look Up can physically see the threat heading towards them, they still choose not to believe it – because, naturally, it scares them. As it does everybody. 

“By ignoring the science, we’re avoiding the inevitable, but by stopping ourselves from exploring these feelings of mortality, we’re actually just joining the ranks of ‘Don’t Look Up’ protestors, avoiding facing what’s really in front of us, which in turn means we’re avoiding being part of the solution to reverse climate change.”

Abi, Ecologi

The scenario in Don’t Look Up isn’t a perfect analogy for climate change. For starters, the threat of the comet strike is fundamentally different to that of climate change, and it’s important to understand this in order to draw useful learnings from the film.

In some ways, climate scientists and activists might wish that the threat of climate change could be observed as visually and immediately as a comet flying towards the Earth! The threat of the comet is clearly defined, and characters in the film can literally see it heading towards them (hence the title, Don’t Look Up). The impacts of climate change are much harder to distill into an image as compelling as an incoming comet – making it harder to encourage people to act immediately to avoid further loss and damage.

In the film, the scientists first observe the comet and its path to strike Earth with around 6 months’ notice before impact. In contrast, we’ve known about climate change and the role of humans in causing it since the 1800s, and only very recently have global leaders begun to take the threat seriously. Moreover, part of the problem we face with climate change is the idea that impacts are somewhere indeterminate in the future – and so the analogy of a comet striking the Earth isn’t perfect here.

The film also portrays political actors delaying action on the comet when it is discovered that there are apparent economic gains to be made by doing so. This satirises certain misguided arguments against climate mitigation, since combating climate change will in reality bring far more benefits, including sustainable and long-term economic growth, than an unwillingness to adapt. This dichotomy of pitting economic growth against solving the existential issue is a useful tool in the film, but in mapping it across to the reality of climate change it is imperfect, since the opportunity to develop a green economy, still bringing some economic growth but prioritising planetary and human health over economic gain, genuinely presents countless new jobs and opportunities, and mitigates further climate risks.

What is clear is that Don’t Look Up has opened many people’s eyes to the reality of climate inaction. Its viewership tells us that!

The film draws attention to the importance of not ignoring things that scare us, and by doing so has helped to start conversations about climate change that may not otherwise have taken place. 

“I have had conversations with friends and family about climate change for the first time because they watched ‘Don’t Look Up’. That has been the biggest win for me from the movie, it has encouraged discussion among people who are at various stages of their journey in taking climate action.”

Paula, Ecologi

By talking about climate change, and finding new ways of communicating about it, we begin a journey from thoughts to action, helping those struggling to come to terms with climate change to take meaningful action. And for those already working hard to do their part in the fight against climate change, the film strengthened their resolve to continue that work. Alex, one of our Senior Developers, said the film had made him “more determined to push harder on everything that is possible for me to do personally to help with the climate crisis”.

We need to bring along as many people as we can in our mission to combat climate change, and a simple conversation sparked by a film such as Don’t Look Up can lead to a lifetime of climate action. To that end, however imperfect the analogy is, and however challenging the content is, media like this is crucial in our drive to restore the planet.

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