In December last year, we received a letter from the UK’s Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, saying that he was not concerned about the risk of astronomical bodies colliding with Earth, because “the rate of impacts is calculable, small and not increasing” (January p27). At first glance, I might therefore have dismissed the Netflix film Don’t Look Up, released in late December, which is about a comet on course to hit us, as just another sensationalist disaster movie. But after watching the trailer, I knew that, at its core, this film isn’t really talking about a comet strike.

Written and directed by Adam McKay, Don’t Look Up begins with astronomy PhD student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her supervisor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) discovering a Mount Everest-sized comet – a “planet killer” – set to crash into Earth, causing an “extinction-level event” in six months’ time. The pair contact NASA and are put in touch with the head of its Planetary Defense Coordination Office (Rob Morgan), who flies them out to Washington DC for a meeting with US President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep). What drives the drama from this point is that, when the scientists tell people about their finding, almost no-one seems to care.

President Orlean appears mildly irritated by their presence, and it is clear that she is only interested in winning points in the polls. Journalists, meanwhile, would rather report the story as a “little science experiment”, or not at all, while the public is largely distracted by social media and the romantic troubles of pop star Riley Bina (Ariana Grande).

This premise would be too unbelievable – nonsensical even – if it didn’t so aptly mirror society’s behaviour in the face of the existential threat posed by climate change. In this respect, the film is obvious about its message, but I mean that in a good way. The absurdity of our lackadaisical response to our environmental predicament really calls for something that reflects it in the most unambiguous terms.

The analogy of a hazardous comet is useful in achieving this, as it has some properties that climate change lacks; it is a visible object with a discrete location and a very specific time at which it will do its damage. Climate change, on the other hand, is much more nebulous and therefore more insidious. I, for one, have become used to hearing in the news that “we can’t say for certain if global warming caused this specific disaster, but it will increase the frequency of such events…” It just doesn’t provoke the same anxiety for most people, even if it should.

So the film brings a beautiful bluntness to the topic in a way that I haven’t seen before in fiction. But that isn’t to say that it has no subtlety at all. The parallels are cleverly crafted, with well-thought-through details filling in a complex picture of reality. The audience will recognize characters who latch on to the idea that the comet’s collision is not 100% certain (it’s 99.78% certain) and who indignantly quote a scientist dismissing it as “more near-miss hysteria”. It turns out that the “expert” in question is in fact an anaesthesiologist, not an astronomer. The politicizing of scientific facts is also given a thorough treatment. At various points, officials throw accusations of fear mongering at scientists, claim that the comet will actually be good for the economy or even sow doubt that it exists at all.

I particularly enjoyed the story about Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), a billionaire tech-company chief executive who wants to harness the comet’s rare minerals with advanced but unproven technology. He promises that his plan will also prevent the comet from killing everyone, and treats those who doubt this gamble as naysayers who lack vision. This feels painfully similar to real-world corporations that prefer to avoid cutting their emissions by instead focusing on the development of techno-fixes, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS). Projects developing this technology currently only store a tiny fraction of global emissions, have repeatedly missed targets and face colossal challenges in scaling up.

Sure, CCS could be an essential part of a long-term decarbonization strategy, but it would be a huge risk to delay reducing our emissions now, relying on the hope that CCS will solve the whole problem before we reach planetary tipping points.

There are, of course, places where the film’s analogy breaks down. No-one set the comet on its trajectory as a by-product of profit-driven activities. The impact is also predicted to kill everyone on Earth quite quickly whereas climate change will catch up more gradually with those who are most responsible – even if it is already affecting many of those who have contributed the least to it. I would have liked to see more about this aspect of climate justice, which is only briefly hinted at. Nevertheless, the film packs a lot into its two hours and alludes to a great many of the complexities of our situation, even if the parallels don’t always line up perfectly.

Despite its serious message, however, Don’t Look Up is an entertaining and genuinely funny film, fleshed out with character arcs that kept me invested in the fates of the individuals. I was rooting for the astronomers as they tried increasingly desperate approaches to convince people to do something, while navigating their personal lives and grappling with the fact that they might only have six months to live. There are also some nods to academia that scientists will appreciate, such as the importance of peer review, the “publish or perish” problem and the issue of senior academics getting the credit for their PhD students’ discoveries.

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All this enriches the movie beyond being the cold skeleton of an analogy, preventing it from feeling too preachy and making its message more palatable. But the irony of this is not lost on me. The film itself acknowledges the problems with society’s demand for this kind of media. When two TV show hosts joke about the comet and seem not to register the gravity of the situation, Dibiasky is left bewildered, and questions if she was clear in what she had just told them. “We just keep the bad news light” because it “helps the medicine go down” they explain. “Maybe the destruction of the entire planet isn’t supposed to be fun,” responds an exasperated Dibiasky. “Maybe it’s supposed to be terrifying.”

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