I should have watched this ages ago but so many newer American films run to significantly longer than two hours and that makes it harder to schedule the time needed. Then there’s the fact that once you know its premise and you’re on the side of the scientists, it’s almost unnecessary to watch this as it plays out almost exactly as you predict. The film has such a large cast and is so-on-nose with its character archetypes and situations that I can’t rank it very highly in terms of artistic merit. But even if it does nothing but preach to the converted, I am of course one of them and it is so cathartic to watch the truth-denying Trumpists crash headlong into reality even if the rest of the world ends up paying the price along with them.

Kate Dibiasky, a Ph.D. candidate astronomy student, notices a previously undiscovered comet and notifies her professor Dr. Randall Mindy. At first they are elated but then they realize that the comet is on a collision course with Earth and will impact in about six months. Dr. Mindy starts warning everyone and NASA confirms that the impact is a planet-wide extinction event. With Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, the head of the US agency most qualified to deal with this crisis, the two travel to the White House to brief the President. However President Janie Orlean and her son Jason who serves as her Chief of Staff makes them wait and then dismisses them, being more preoccupied with the upcoming mid-term elections and a brewing scandal with her Supreme Court nominee. Despite being asked to keep it secret, Dibiasky and Mindy leak the news to the public and manage to get airtime on a popular talk show. However the two hosts are only interested in making light of the news and treating it as entertainment. When Dibiasky loses her temper and tries to warn everyone that they are going to die, she is immediately branded as a crazy, unhinged woman by the public.

Though this was made as a response to America’s, and arguably the world’s, lack of urgency in dealing with climate change as well as the unbelievable ridiculousness of the Trump presidency, this film gains even more salience in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The full panoply of America’s idiocracy is on display here: science deniers, politicians whose only concern is winning the next election, billionaires high on their own save-the-world Kool-Aid, a general public more interested in celebrity gossip than science news, polemicists who just need to be contrarian for its own sake and much more. Every bit of this will be familiar to those of us who have lived through the past several years. Perhaps too familiar as this film faces the problem that trying to satirize someone like Donald Trump is futile. Anything that the satirists can imagine, Trump will just embrace and even double down on. The film makes the brilliant decision of casting Meryl Streep as the female version of Trump and relentlessly makes fun of the character’s stupidity and short-termism. At the same time however I believe the film itself treats the danger of such leaders too lightly. Trump isn’t funny. He is malevolent and as such extremely frightening while President Orlean is just silly and never flies into a furious rage. The slogan don’t look up itself makes Orlean and her supporters look dumb but when we consider the real-life equivalent there is nothing at all funny about firing up a crowd to attack and kill political enemies.

My favorite character in here is Cate Blanchett’s Brie Evantree as one of the co-hosts of the talk show. At first she comes across as the stereotyped vapid blonde with no knowledge of science. After starting an affair with her however, Mindy discovers that she comes from an immensely rich family, with the wealth coming from an ancestor’s widely-used invention, and she herself has two Masters’ degrees and speaks multiple languages. As such her reaction to the crisis isn’t born out of stupidity but from extreme cynicism and a far better understanding of what moves the general public than Mindy has. The film excels in many other small ways as well, such as how Mindy is pushed bit by bit to be the face of the scientific response to the comet even though Dibiasky was the person who made the discovery; the film director who advocates reconciliation between the two opposing factions by agreeing that both are right; even how Mindy and his faction eventually have to rely a pop star singing a song to spread the message to take urgent action and so on.

Finally the film is notably light on what is going on outside of the US. That’s understandable as this is a critique of politics in the US and trying to work in the politics of other countries into it would just muddy the waters. I do like how it shows the people of other countries watch the launching US rockets in apprehension while the Americans mostly look hopeful. I found this to be a funny and clever film but of course I would be as it’s on my side. To the opposing side however it does nothing but try to mock and humiliate them for being dumb and easily misled so this is unlikely to change anyone’s minds and on the contrary will probably deepen America’s cultural divide.