Don’t Look Up perpetuated one of Hollywood disaster movies’ biggest clichés by putting the focus entirely on the American government and the lives of American citizens, despite the impending meteorite being a global disaster. The film was met with mixed reviews for its heavy-handed satire, though its underlying message was applauded as commendable. However, despite trying to change the mindsets of Netflix users and cinema-goers worldwide, the film once again put the fate of the world in the hands of the United States.
Don’t Look Up revolved around two American scientists, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), as they desperately tried to get the world to realize that a meteorite was about to end all life on Earth. The film also focused on the President of the United States (played by Meryl Streep) as well as Peter Isherwell, a Tim Cook style figure played by Mark Rylance. All of these central characters, plus the many side characters, were based in the US, and the film followed the efforts of the US government and US citizens exclusively, despite logic dictating that in such an event, all countries would work to handle the catastrophe.
Platforming the United States as the center of the world is nothing new in disaster movie history, and Don’t Look Up simply perpetuated an existing stereotype. Movies ranging from The Day After Tomorrow to Armageddon have historically ignored the rest of the world and focused on the American response, despite the threat of extinction being shared by everyone on Earth. Don’t Look Up kept this tradition alive by following an exclusively American cast of characters and having the movie set entirely in the United States (bar the mid-credits scene on another planet).
The movie did make the occasional reference to other countries, however. The United Nations was name-dropped a few times, and the film ultimately concluded with the joint efforts of Russia, China, and India to try and deflect the meteorite, after Isherwell forced the President to abort the States’ earlier attempt. However, such references were very brief, and the audience was never given the perspective of any character that wasn’t American, feeding into the narrative that America was the center of the world.
Positioning one country as the ambassador for Earth isn’t an exclusively American phenomenon, but as Hollywood continues to put out the largest number of major blockbusters, the problem is most visible in American disaster films. Of course, this could’ve been part of Adam McKay’s satire in Don’t Look Up. The film was clearly riffing on movies like The Day After Tomorrow, so perhaps the choice to put the focus on America was intentional, to demonstrate how the media so often portrays it as a stand-in for all of humanity, despite the fact that in reality, major decisions would likely be made by several countries.
The satire in Don’t Look Up wasn’t received as warmly as that of McKay’s other satirical films, Vice and The Big Short. Though the movie undoubtedly had a strong message about the public’s varying responses to climate change, it ultimately relied on heavy-handed jokes and disaster movie clichés, instead of subverting them. Most problematically, Don’t Look Up made it clear that in a world-ending crisis, it was only the United States’ opinions and actions that mattered.
