Invited by Marcelo Lima, a street cinema enthusiast who had the courage to reopen the old Cinearte, in Conjunto Nacional, in the midst of the pandemic, I went to watch the cinema premiere of “No Look Up”, a satire written and directed by Adam McKay that will be released on Netflix’s streaming platform on Christmas Eve.
The script isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s good for the message it sends to the general public, showing in a dramatic and amusing tone how scientific denial and promiscuity between public authorities and the private sector can affect the future of the planet.
A doctoral student of astronomy, played by Jennifer Laurence, while monitoring supernovae, visualizes the tail of a giant comet, 100 kilometers in diameter. Its advisor, an astronomer starring Leonardo DiCaprio, discovers that the comet was on a collision course with Earth.
If nothing was done, in six months it would crash into the Pacific Ocean, causing 1.5-kilometer-high tsunamis, 10 to 11-degree earthquakes on the Richter scale and the complete destruction of life on the planet. 66 million years ago, an asteroid crashed into the planet, extinguishing dinosaurs and many other living things.
Science fiction in the catastrophe genre, between a satire and a comedy, the film uses an occurrence that is practically impossible to happen (according to Amy Mainzer, from NASA, a phenomenon like this only happens once every 100 million years) to warn about the neglect of climate emergencies and other environmental disasters.
(Spoilers to follow)
In the film, despite the discovery having been reviewed and confirmed by other scientists, including NASA’s planetary defense coordinator, the US president, Meryl Streep, does not give great importance to the possible catastrophe, as some presidents did in relation to Covid . After all, as the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro (PL) said, everyone will die someday!
In the press, the discovery is treated with disbelief, with journalists doubting the gravity of the situation. The public prefers celebrity amenities to believing the Earth could be destroyed in six months.
But the president, realizing that media action could improve her weak popularity, decides to act. Set up a mega-operation to divert the comet’s path, using rockets and astronauts, a solution recommended by scientists.
When the operation begins, the CEO of a large private technology and cell phone company, one of the richest men in the world, convinces the president to stop it, because he discovers that the comet has very valuable ores. It proposes to disintegrate it when it gets closer to Earth, to appropriate its riches.
The proposal, developed by the company with the support of a few scientists, is not peer-reviewed but is advertised by a strong media campaign, which convinces many. The parents of a young scientist who denounces the fragility of this operation refuse to welcome her at home, arguing that she is harming the country, as she is against the creation of jobs and the generation of wealth.
When the comet is visible to the naked eye in the sky, society is divided between those who believe in imminent risk and deniers, who are seduced by the private operation’s marketing motto (“Don’t Look Up”, as in the film’s title) , recommend “looking down”, denying the scientific evidence.
The operation fails and life as we know it on Earth is destroyed.
The satire is exaggerated, has a sleazy humor and caricatures the characters, but warns of a catastrophe that won’t occur in six months, or all of a sudden, in a single extreme event, but is happening every month, in different places of the planet.
The film’s message is obvious (too obvious) and is related to the denial of scientific evidence, the prevalence of private interests over public power and the greed of capitalism that has no limits when it sees a good business opportunity.
As McKay said, when radicalizing an occurrence, the film alerts to concrete questions. Just read the weekend news, with the floods in the south of Bahia and the more than 30 tornadoes that devastated five American states, to see which parts of the planet are being slowly destroyed.
Watching the film, I remembered the disaster that the company Salgema, currently owned by Braskem, caused in Maceió (AL), in the biggest urban environmental tragedy in Brazil.
In the 1960s, large quantities of rock salt were found underground in the city’s urban area and, in 1976, the company began digging mines in the region, about a thousand meters deep, with the consent of the local authorities. At the time, geologists warned of the risk of the operation, but they were not taken seriously, being considered enemies of progress.
After three decades of underground exploration, buildings in five neighborhoods began to crack, and in 2018, the city suffered an earthquake-like aftershock. A few months later, the Brazilian Geological Survey confirmed that Braskem’s 35 mines had destabilized the soil of a densely populated urban area, which needed to be vacated, putting tens of thousands of residents at risk.
About 15 thousand homes were closed, causing the forced removal of 57 thousand people. The neighborhoods of Pinheiro, Mutange, Bom Parto, Bebedouro and part of Farol became a ghost town, with dozens of closed streets.
Thousands of buildings, including houses, housing developments and vertical buildings, which were in use until three years ago, are abandoned and in ruins.
Fair Bluff, a small town in North Carolina (USA), is undergoing a similar process. Hit by hurricane Matthew in 2016, it went into an abandonment process. Roads gave way, public buildings and factories were destroyed. A quarter of the houses were flooded. Two years later, in another hurricane, Florence found little to destroy. The population has halved and the city is insolvent.
This scenario of devastation and abandonment is present in several regions of the United States, affected by extreme events related to the climate crisis, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and forest fires, as the series of reports by Marina Dias and Lalo de Almeida is showing.
“Don’t Look Up” is a satire to be taken seriously. Not that a comet is about to hit us, but because it shows how scientific denial and savage capitalism lead us, little by little, to a scene of devastation.
.
