Don’t Look Up

You must see this movie on Netflix.

[from wikipedia]

Kate Dibiasky, a Michigan State University astronomy PhD candidate doing work with the Subaru Telescope, discovers a previously unknown comet. Her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy, calculates that it will impact Earth in about six months and is large enough to cause a planet-wide extinction event, which NASA internally confirms. Accompanied by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office head Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, Dibiasky and Mindy present their findings to the White House, but are met with apathy from President Janie Orlean and her son, Chief of Staff Jason Orlean.

Oglethorpe urges Dibiasky and Mindy to leak the news to the media, which they do on a morning talk show hosted by Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer. When the hosts treat the topic frivolously, Dibiasky loses her composure and rants about the threat, prompting widespread online mockery. Dibiasky’s boyfriend publicly denounces her, while Mindy receives public approval for his good looks. The actual news about the comet’s threat receives little public attention, and is then denied by Orlean’s Director of NASA, a top donor to Orlean with no background in astronomy. When Orlean is involved in a sex scandal with her Supreme Court nominee, she diverts attention and improves her approval ratings by confirming the threat of the comet, announcing a project to strike and divert the comet using nuclear weapons.

The mission successfully launches, but Orlean abruptly aborts it when Peter Isherwell, the billionaire CEO of tech company BASH and another top donor, discovers that the comet contains trillions of dollars’ worth of rare-earth elements. The White House agrees to commercially exploit the comet by fragmenting and recovering it from the ocean using new technology proposed by BASH’s Nobel Laureates in a scheme that has not undergone scholarly peer review. The White House sidelines Dibiasky and Oglethorpe, while hiring Mindy as the National Science Advisor to co-opt him. Dibiasky tries to mobilize public opposition to the scheme, but gives up under threat from the Orlean administration. Mindy becomes a prominent voice advocating for the comet’s commercial opportunities, and begins an affair with Evantee.

World opinion is divided among those who demand total destruction of the comet, those who decry alarmism and believe that mining the comet will create jobs, and those who deny that the comet even exists. Dibiasky returns home to Illinois and begins a fatalistic relationship with Yule, a shoplifter she meets at her retail job. Mindy’s wife June discovers his infidelity. Becoming angry and frustrated, Mindy rants on live television, criticizing Orlean for downplaying the impending apocalypse and questioning humanity’s indifference. Cut off from the administration, Mindy reconciles with Dibiasky as the comet becomes visible from Earth. Mindy, Dibiasky, and Oglethorpe organize a protest campaign on social media against Orlean and BASH, telling people to “Just Look Up” and calling on other countries to conduct comet interception operations of their own.

Orlean’s administration launches an opposing campaign, “Don’t Look Up”. Orlean cuts China, India, and Russia out of the comet mining deal, so they prepare a joint effort to deflect the comet, but their spacecraft explodes on the launchpad. BASH’s attempt at breaking the comet apart also goes awry and fails, so Isherwell, Orlean, and others in their elite circle board a sleeper spaceship designed to find an Earth-like planet, inadvertently leaving Jason Orlean behind. President Orlean offers Mindy two places on the ship, but he declines, choosing to spend a final evening with his family, Dibiasky, Yule, and Oglethorpe. The comet hits the planet as expected, rendering it uninhabitable.

After 22,740 years, the people who left Earth before the impact land on a lush alien planet, ending their cryogenic sleep. They exit their spacecraft nude and mostly empty-handed, admiring the planet. Orlean is quickly killed and eaten by a native animal, and others of its kind surround the humans.

A post-credits scene shows Jason Orlean, emerging from the rubble, trying to post on social media.