Following a leak, Netflix has released the first trailer for its start-studded disaster movie Don’t Look Up, which follows astronomers played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence trying to inform the President–and the world at large–that a comet is coming to destroy Earth. The problem is, no one believes them.
“Do you know how many ‘the-world-is-ending’ meetings we’ve had over the last two years?” Meryl Streep’s US President character says when presented with the life-changing information. Jonah Hill’s chief of staff character says, “drought, famine, hole in the ozone… it’s so boring.”
“Turns out warning mankind about a planet-killer the size of Mount Everest is an inconvenient fact to navigate,” reads a line from the movie’s description.
DiCaprio and Lawrence’s characters, Randall and Kate, set out on a media tour to try to get the word out about the Earth’s impending doom. In addition to talking to the President and Chief of Staff, Randall and Kate go on a morning show with characters played by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry. “With only six months until the comet makes impact, managing the 24-hour news cycle and gaining the attention of the social media obsessed public before it’s too late proves shockingly comical–what will it take to get the world to just look up
Don’t Look Up was written and directed by Adam McKay, who previously directed Anchorman and Step Brothers before getting into somewhat more serious fare with The Big Short and Vice. He says Don’t Look Up borrows a trope from Jaws where the mayor denies the existence of a killer shark, even though the evidence is all around him. In Don’t Look Up, people seemingly don’t want to believe the meteor is coming, even though experts say it is.
“So it’s two mid-level, very sincere astronomers who make the discovery of a lifetime, which is a killer asteroid headed toward Earth. They have to warn everyone and have to go on a media tour,” McKay said (via MovieWeb). “It’s them navigating our world. It’s them navigating their equivalent of Twitter. It’s them navigating the political landscape. It’s them navigating talk shows and how they’re perceived. I call it a dark comedy.”
The film is also about how people struggle to communicate these days thanks to the internet.
“We can’t even talk to each other anymore. We can’t even agree. So it’s about climate change, but at its root [Don’t Look Up is] about what has the internet, what have cellphones, what has the modern world done to the way we communicate,” McKay told Collider.
In addition to Lawrence, DiCaprio, Streep, Hill, Blanchett, and Perry, Don’t Look Up features Mark Rylance, Ron Perlman, Timothee Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi, Himesh Patel, Melanie Lynskey, Michael Chiklis, and Tomer Sisley.
Don’t Look Up will play in select theaters on December 10, 2021, before coming to Netflix on December 24.
Source: Gamespot
