Why 'Don't Look Up' Miserably Fails as an Allegory to Anything Other Than Hollywood Woke-ism

The makers and stars of the Netflix movie “Don’t Look Up” have said that it is intended to be a clever allegory for our society’s ongoing failure to react to the varying, model-based theories about “Climate Change” that have permeated our news media for the last half-century now in the exact way that abused teenager Greta Thunberg would prefer for us to react.

These theories offer myriad projections that range all over the place now, yet because we as a global society have not chosen to sentence billions of human beings to starvation or painful deaths from plagues and weather by forcing ourselves to go back to a 19th century subsistence-level existence to prevent a 1-2 degree rise in average temperatures, Hollywood wants us to believe that that is the exact, same thing to failing to respond to the prospect of a massive comet causing an extinction level event by slamming into our planet.

Sure.

Just for grins, the wifey and I decided to take the movie in over the weekend and found it to be midly entertaining, funny even in spurts, especially with one running gag Jennifer Lawrence keeps going throughout, and anytime Ariana Grande appeared in a scene. As a farcical comedy, it kind of works. As a clever commentary on actual current society and events, not so much. As an allegory to climate change or any other specific current major topic, it fails miserably.

My wife is a brilliant woman who knows all about the climate change controversy, but doesn’t pay attention to the politics surrounding it, and had no idea that this flick even existed until I suggested we watch it. It has a great cast full of big stars, so she thought it would be greatly entertaining. About 80% of the way through the film, I paused the feed and asked her if she thought this movie is a clever allegory about any current events. She looked at me like I’m crazy, and said “not really, no. Is it supposed to be?”

“So, you’re not seeing it as a commentary on society’s failure to respond to climate change?”

“[Laughs] No. Don’t be ridiculous.” So we continued through the rest of the movie, and to be honest, at the end we had been entertained for 2 hours. So we had that going for us.

But look, this movie misses every mark in terms of being really relevant about anything. Leonardo DiCaprio is typically great playing the scientist - he is undeniably one of the very finest actors of his generation, perhaps the best. He’s like Denzel Washington or Gene Hackman: He’s always great in every role, doesn’t matter what the role happens to be or how well the film around him is done. He is a person who takes his craft very, very seriously.

But as someone who can preach to us about climate change??? Please.

Here is a photo collage of DiCaprio and his yacht:

For some visual context, here is a look at the interior of AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where the Dallas Cowboys play their games. We like to call it Jerry World here in Texas:

Now, DiCaprio’s yacht is 417 feet long. That means it would fill the entire field of this stadium, all the way to the edges of the north and south stands, with many feet of spillover. The yacht is so tall that it would obscure most fans’ views of that massive scoreboard that hangs down from the roof. This yacht burns 300 gallons of fossil fuel every hour its engines run and has the carbon footprint of some small African nations. [Not really, but that’s a clever allegory, see?]

DiCaprio also owns his own fleet of private jets and helicopters, all of which run on fossil fuels, not on windmills or solar panels. He owns an array of enormous, carbon-using and creating mansions in exotic locations like most fabulously wealthy individuals - pretty much all of whom are Democrats these days - like to do.

Cool. I do not begrudge him any of that, and would probably do the same thing If I had made billions of dollars making movies. (I hate to admit that about myself, but I try to be realistic.) But DiCaprio, great actor though he may be, was literally the worst choice for the producers of this film to make for this role, precisely because he is such a raging hypocrite on the subject of climate change.

Meryl Streep, another truly great generational actor, plays the president, who is obviously - as is required by Hollywood for any presidential character played in a negative light - a Republican. She’s such a Republican, in fact, that she keeps a portrait not of Lincoln or Reagan above her Oval Office desk, but of Nixon. Because, of course she does. A truly edgy, clever movie that wanted to break actual ground and be truly relevant to society would have had her playing a Democrat president along the lines of, say, Hillary Clinton. The resemblance is there, after all.

But no, Streep had to be a Republican, because that’s a tiresome requirement, so any potential relevance or edginess her character might have actually possessed to actual current society was tossed into the round file. That decision inevitably led to also making the real bad guy in the movie - the Big Tech magnate styled as the 2nd richest man in the world - equally irrelevant and without any edginess at all.

After all, all of those kinds of billionaires in our society in the 21st century are in fact Democrats. Jeff Bezos at Amazon; Tim Cook at Apple; Bill Gates at Microsoft and forced vaccines; Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. On and on it goes. All very active leftists who use their money to kill freedoms for normal people in our society. Oh, the billionaire class used to be largely Republican back in the last century, but that was before they all realized that the easiest way to become billionaires would be to elect Democrats who would steer the vast resources of the federal government to their personal benefit.

In the end, the producers’, director’s and writers’ efforts to make this movie clever and relevant to current events and climate change all crashed up on the shoals of one thing: The current woke-ism that demands the only bad politicians or businessmen in any mainstream Hollywood film or TV show must be Republicans.

That doesn’t make it a bad movie. What we are left with instead is a fairly entertaining comedic farce that hits on some levels, provides a few laugh-out-loud moments and that you don’t even have to pay a rental fee to watch if you have a regular monthly Netflix account. Cool.

But don’t let anyone kid you: This movie is not an allegory about our society’s failure to address “climate change.” What it is is a testament to how Hollywood’s raging woke-ism means that truly relevant and socially-edgy films can no longer be made.

That is all.