Don't Look Up is not about climate change

The metaphor they chose creates fundamental problems which reverberate throughout the movie.

After all the praise from climate scientists about Don’t Look Up, I was looking forward to watching it. However, at its core the movie simply isn’t about climate change and does a poor job of representing the power dynamics at play. The movie falls into many pitfalls that we’ve been warning against, with the director even suggesting that we need carbon capture and storage! The things he points to may be part of the solution, but they are really just icing on the cake of the revolution we need. 

We have to start with the core metaphor, because it is the root of the problems with the film as a climate change allegory. The political economy of an asteroid strike is completely inverse to that of climate change. An asteroid which affects every person on the planet threatening us in a very short time frame is nothing like climate change, which has very unequal impacts and affects us over centuries with those impacts slowly ramping up until the world is unrecognisable. Not much like an asteroid impact with a clear delineation between success (averting the strike/apocalypse) and failure. 

The movie plays to the audience of those people who love the theatre of apocalypse but, as many have pointed out, climate change is not an “apocalypse”. This framing relies on narratives of existential endings which simply are not at play. Who’s apocalypse are we talking about? How are we to understand the destruction of communities outside of the west as anything but apocalyptic in this framework? If so, then the apocalypse could be pushed right back to the industrial revolution, in which case it loses all meaning. So the metaphor itself fails, and this problem reverberates across the film. 

Even so, the movie really had me in the first five minutes. The moment that Jeniffer Lawrence’s character finds the comet, and those moments of “oh fuck this is really happening, it really is that bad” echoed and condensed feelings that I’ve had repeatedly over the last few years as I’ve started working in the leading edge of the climate space. However, as soon as they get to Washington it all falls apart for me. 

The movie portrays the people in power as both incompetent and uninterested. This isn’t a complete misframing of the issue, but it is naive. It leans into the recent phenomenon of academics screaming “please, listen to the scientists”.This has been unpicked repeatedly in relation to the pandemic, the problem is not a scientific one but a political and economic problem. The movie’s protagonists represent exactly this, they spend the entire time trying to get people to “listen to them” without doing anything material to build a movement, and when people don’t “listen” they give up. In relation to climate change this is even more problematic because the political economic rationale is flipped. 

By the time they get to building movements, they’ve already overlooked the public’s direct expression of fear and rage (the film portrays this as a “riot” and quickly glosses over it in favour of focusing on a concert). Instead of looking outside of the halls of state bureaucracy for solutions after being presented with the disinterest of the leaders, they continue to focus on how to get action at that level. This is enforced by the metaphor they chose, an asteroid requires state intervention, but climate change requires decentralised and community centred solutions. 

This is where the tech-obsession comes into focus. Even the “workable” solution to the problem is tech, a set of nukes fired at the asteroid, which requires large, centralised powers to act unilaterally. This is the complete opposite of what we need for climate change, but it does explain why the director was proposing CCS as a solution (when it has been widely debunked as not only impossible at the scales we need, but also a barrier to real progress). 

Ultimately, climate change is not a technological problem, nor is it a problem of “the elites are not listening”. The elites do listen, they simply see opportunities to profit from the destruction of the natural environment. The film does try to grapple with this, in it’s Musk analogue, but this falls completely flat because again they are portrayed as stupid in the face of an existential crisis rather than actively malicious. 

The oil companies are not continuing to extract because they don’t think climate change is real or don’t understand the severity of the problem, they simply know that they don’t need to care and would rather see their profits increase than lives be saved (as an aside, this was plainly demonstrated when I challenged Shell’s head of climate strategy on his lack of consideration for the need to reduce consumption, and he immediately jumped to saying that population was the real problem). This is the inequality of climate change, which finds no purchase in a comet apocalypse metaphor. 

Climate change is not a hard line across which we can never cross. It is not a moment of explosion which destroys everything before it. It is the emergence of a new world, and the re-emergence of the natural world as an active player in our lives. It requires us to live differently on a day to day basis, not to generate new tech to allow us to continue living the same way. This requires popular movements and solidarity, something which is irrelevant in the face of an asteroid strike.