Time for a movie review!  Don’t Look Up was released recently on Netflix and it is polarizing people so naturally we can sort it all out here.

The film has some serious star power, no doubt this is what drew attention to it in the first place. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play the two key roles in the film and they ably supported by Meryl Streep, Johan Hill and a host of other familiar names. Arianne Grande throws in the celebrity musician appearance and so life is good that way.

Oddly enough that is the chief flaw in the film. Leo and Jennifer are simply not convincing enough as a middle aged physicist professor and his grad student. Leo is now fat and middle aged so that kind of fits, however Jennifer does not carry it at all. She is completely wooden and almost ruins the show.

I say almost because I initially gave up after 15 minutes.  If you have seen the trailer you know the basic plot. (Warning: there will be spoilers in this review, so read at your own risk or watch the movie first.) The grad student discovers a comet headed right to earth in about six months time. So she and her professor bring this news to the powers that be in the government and the media as well expecting everyone to be freaked out and take some direct action.

Instead they are met with complete self-absorption, and everyone from the President(played by Meryl Streep) onwards in only concerned with their ratings and popularity. The world is going to end and people only care if it will impact their self-image.  Seems about right for our social media age.

The plot however is so on-the-nose so that, along with the miscast leads, the movie starts flat and I had to turn off the streaming after 15 minutes. It just didn’t feel compelling enough to watch. Haven’t we heard this social media critique before in various ways? (Aubrey Fuller btw does a fantastic job in Ingrid Goes West, a great film on this subject.)

However luck was on my side otherwise I would have missed out on a great film. A friend of mine saw it and I asked him to tell me the ending. On hearing how the film ends I was intrigued enough to want to watch the ending. So I fast forwarded to the last 10 minutes (the power of streaming!) and indeed the ending did really nail it.

So then I went back and watched the entire film. Once you get past the aforementioned flaws, it is a fun, powerful satire revealing a great truth about where we are as a culture. What is this truth?  Let’s unpack it all and see!

Leo and Jennifer’s characters assisted by a Nasa scientist played by Rob Morgan try very hard to get people to pay attention.  They succeed eventually, somewhat at least, as plans are made to disrupt the comet. However the CEO of the mega phone company, ably played by Peter Isherwell has other ideas as to what to do with the comet.

Who will come out on top? you can watch the movie to find out. However a word on this CEO character. Isherwell does a fantastic job portraying your typical tech leader. Mildly autistic, performance obsessed, but also speaking the jargon of saving the world. Don’t you hear that every time? Some new thing comes along and it is now obligatory for the CEO to say how it is going to change the world for the better and how they are just hoping to connect everyone together in one happy drum circle.

Or something like that.  Yoga babble is what it is called and it combined with a ruthless focus on results is the profile du jour of a tech CEO.  The workings of the phone company are also well portrayed. Every last thing that the user does is recorded and analyzed. In a funny moment in the film the CEO lets Leo know that he has 40 million data points about him and even knows when and how Leo will die.

It is true, the phone company or Google or Facebook or any other site you use a lot knows you better than your mother. And that would be your job if you worked for a place like Facebook. You’d spend your time collecting data about all that your user does on your site(and off it if the user is still signed in!) to figure out the best way to make money from them.

So what does this have to do with Christianity as I allude to in the title of this review? We are getting there. Warning, lots more spoilers ahead. As the comet gets closer people have to decide what to do with their last moments on this Earth. Leo and Jennifer’s characters head back home to Michigan. Leo’s character has became a minor celebrity and got to sleep with the hot News Lady, however in the end he wants to go home.

And so they have their Last Supper, family and friends all sitting around the table, and in a nice twist, the punk guy whom Jennifer’s character has befriended recites the prayer before the meal. He is the only one who knows any prayer.

While people around the world are shown choosing their own ways of spending the last hours however it is implied that this last supper, this meal enjoyed with family and friends was indeed the best way. And this is a very basic Christian message isn’t it? That in the end, home, heart and family is where it is at. Not sex or fame or fortune or possessions or peak experiences  but the warm glow of family all sitting around the table, which in the long run is the ultimate peak experience.

So does the film have a moral message? Yes and no. Yes the characters that Leo and Jennifer encounter in the news and tech and government areas are shown to be solipsistic narcissists. The Hot News Lady, ably played by Cate Blanchett chooses her final act to be drinking and talking shit about people.  She is so far gone down the rabbit hole of success that she cannot care about anything.

It is true, in many ways it is harder to live (a spiritually disciplined life) with grand success than with struggle. Struggle naturally imposes discipline and that gives your life a shape. When there are not many choices that dinner with the family sounds great.

However when you have all kinds of options? In the film the Hot News Lady is born in to wealth and then makes a whole lot herself, she has also won the genetic lottery looks wise so gets lots of attention. Abundance is her karma.  So while she has to be disciplined to keep her job, she doesn’t have to be disciplined in her personal dealings with people.

But since the film implies Leo’s choice is better, isn’t it setting things straight then? Well, what is the actual reality? What we actually do is a better indicator of where the zeitgeist is that what we say. How much of that idealized family life still exists? As has been Michel Houellebecq’s critique, in the mainstream West, not much at all.

And then given the choice of having an average steady job in a small town with a family and plodding along that way for the rest of your life versus being able to make it big tracking people’s activities online or spouting some clickbait on the news while living out your hedonistic pleasures which would you choose? The proof is in the pudding my dears, in the choices we actually make. Are we are more and more frequently making the latter choice. How many of the people who made this film live the former way? That would be interesting to find out too.

So the film then seems less a moral message versus a nostalgic farewell to a world that is receding further and further into the distance.

It is a fun film. Look up and go see it.