The Mug Says Rip

Nine months after a film in which the American government could not be bothered to hit a comet, NASA hit an asteroid.

Don't Look Up arrived on Netflix on 24 December 2021. The DART spacecraft struck the 160-metre moonlet Dimorphos on 26 September 2022 and shortened its orbit by about 32 minutes, against a success threshold of 73 seconds. The rocket was never the problem. That, in one sentence, is McKay's argument, and it is the sound part of a loud film.

The setup is simple. Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), a doctoral student at Michigan State, finds a comet. Her supervisor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) works out that it will hit Earth in about six months, with extinction-level results. They are believed by the head of NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), and by nobody else with any power. Meryl Streep plays a president called Janie Orlean who is mostly interested in the midterms. Jonah Hill plays her son and chief of staff. Mark Rylance plays Peter Isherwell, the head of a tech company called BASH.

The art: a film that cannot stop pointing

The first act works. Two scientists with a calculation brief the White House and meet apathy. The film gets the small humiliations of expertise right: a result that would end the world is treated as an awkward item in a diary. Lawrence is the best thing in it. Her Kate loses her temper on live television, becomes a meme within the hour, and is treated from then on as a person with a temperament, not a person with a measurement.

The television studio is the film's best set. Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry host The Daily Rip, where the mugs have the show's name on them and a grave announcement is always followed by a joke about a celebrity break-up. This is the film's finest joke, because nothing in it is exaggerated much. The scenes in the studio are sharper media criticism than much of the actual media criticism of the period.

Then the film does what it does throughout, and keeps going. The second half keeps hitting the same bell. A pop-star subplot with Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi turns a campaign called "Just Look Up" into a song, which the other side counters with "Don't Look Up". The score and cutting, by Nicholas Britell and Hank Corwin, are quick and abrasive and, by the hour mark, merely exhausting. McKay does not trust you to infer anything. He will not leave a subtext alone in a room.

Critics split on it, and the split was about tone, not fact. Climate scientists mostly liked it, since they recognised the experience. Many critics found it smug, with some justice. A satire that despises everyone in the frame, the scientists included, ends up with nobody to stand beside. It was also a hit. It set a weekly viewing record for a Netflix film, 152 million hours, in its second week, and it earned four Oscar nominations, among them Best Picture. A lot of people looked up. Whether it changed what they did is another question, and the film is too busy mocking the answer to ask it.

The prophecy: warning, rock, mine

The warning. The film's science is better than its reputation. The consultant was the astronomer Amy Mainzer, who has said she helped design the comet and chose a comet rather than an asteroid: a long-period one, about nine kilometres wide, loosely modelled on Comet NEOWISE. That choice is the right one. More than 90 per cent of asteroids a kilometre or larger are already known, and none is a known hazard; a comet from the outer solar system is the exception that gives months. NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is real, and has been since 2016. The gap the film dramatises is real as well. That puts the machinery of detection, the one thing nobody in the film is at fault for, in the "arrived" column.

The rock. The film launches a nuclear deflection mission and then aborts it. The first half has now been tested, on a small scale and without the bombs. DART moved a rubble pile 160 metres across, and the result is excellent news. It is not a guarantee. One rubble pile, an unmeasured mass and years of preparation are a long way from a nine-kilometre comet and a deadline of six months. The nuclear route is a separate problem: legal scholars point out that treaties limiting nuclear explosions in space were written without a comet in mind, and nobody has agreed in advance who may break them. The film assumes that a decision can be made and a mission built in months, and that the only thing in the way is will. In 2025, a 60-metre asteroid called 2024 YR4 briefly looked like a threat to Earth in 2032, and the lesson was in the timeline: Earth was ruled out, the Moon was ruled out a year later, and nobody had to build a spacecraft in a hurry. We have been spared the test.

The mine. This is the film's biggest invention, and the second half depends on it. Isherwell learns the comet is full of valuable rare earths, and the president, who has just launched a deflection, aborts it. The comet is to be broken up and harvested. American law has allowed citizens to own what they recover from an asteroid since 2015. Actual asteroid mining is, so far, a graveyard of start-ups. Planetary Resources folded in 2018, and AstroForge lost its first probe in March 2025. The mine is plausible in principle and nowhere close in practice. What the film gets right is the grammar of it: a technology firm that takes over a government decision, with an algorithm for everything, including, at the end, a forecast of how the president will die.

The reading

Don't Look Up is a mediocre comedy and a good warning, and it is odd to say both at once. It is at its best when the people are small and the schedule is large, and worst when it stops to explain itself. McKay said the film grew out of his fear about the climate crisis, and it works as a diagram of the loop that the next decade will test again: the alarm, the scepticism, the framing, the sponsor, the delay. Pew's most recent survey finds Americans split along party lines, 87 per cent of Democrats against 31 per cent of Republicans, on whether the government is doing too little about climate change. That is a slower threat than a comet, and a bigger gap than any scientist would like.

The best argument in it is the dullest. The hard part of planetary defence is the part around the rocket: finding the thing, being believed, deciding who flies. We now know the rocket works. We have not yet shown that anyone will be believed in time to use it.