DONT LOOK UP FULL

Now, onscreen at least, they’re colliding, resonating with audiences and tapping into a particular psyche of our moment. What the internet has done to our minds and what our minds have done to our planet (or haven’t done to save it) are two dots that have been circling each other for some time.

DONT LOOK UP FULL

With the hope of snapping the masses from their stupor, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, a young scientist with a Greta Thunberg-like disdain for the apathetic, screams into the camera during a live TV appearance: “You should stay up all night every night crying when we’re all, 100 percent, for sure, going to die!” She’s swiftly dismissed as hysterical, and an image of her face is gleefully seized on for the full meme treatment.

And they return to their phones with a collective “meh” - opting to doomscroll instead of acknowledging certain doom IRL. In “ Don’t Look Up,” Netflix’s hit climate-apocalypse film, this news largely bounces off the American public like a rubber ball. An Everest-size comet is hurtling toward Earth, and in exactly six months and 14 days, the planet will be shattered to pieces, leaving every living creature to perish in a cataclysm of fire and flood.

Dont look up