Don’t Look Up, a 2021 movie by Netflix, deals with irony and dark humor on an urgent and topical theme: disasters with a global impact. In the film, narrating the vicissitudes born from the next impact of a comet with our planet, the parallelism with climate change and the calamities associated with it is clear. The latter, which involve each of us, regardless of social role and economic situation, are often not taken seriously by the media and the population, who deny the evidence. In Don’t look up this attitude is taken to the extreme, with journalists and services who prefer to minimize the very serious real problems to focus on minor events.
The character of Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a young student, is entrusted with the task of giving a psychological slap to the viewer and awakening him from denial; the young woman cuts off the false hopes of each of us by shouting at us that there is no way to escape the problems or postpone them and that these concern all the inhabitants of the planet.
Although the film deals with an event that man cannot remedy, this must give rise to the reflection that, unlike a disaster caused by an asteroid, we can really take action to change something.