'Don't look up' is the new movie that just dropped on Netflix and in theaters
it's an unusual, almost a weird movie, but it's incredibly timely and it focuses on what i think
is one of the most important issues of our time. it involves science and communication with the public
so it's right up our alley. i'm gonna try not to drop too many spoilers but we're gonna be talking
about the movie, about several of the scenes, so if you haven't seen it and you want to go
in completely naive maybe pause this, go watch it first and then come back. the story revolves
around an impending disaster: a huge comet hurtling towards earth that will basically destroy all life
"this comet is what we call a planet killer". the movie follows the two scientists who discovered
the comet and figured out its trajectory: a professor in astronomy played by leonardo dicaprio
and his graduate student played by jennifer lawrence. a lot of the tension and the comedy
comes from this cultural clash, these two academics, these two nerds, basically
trying to communicate the terrible news to the public and really struggling to get anybody to
take them seriously. in one of the scenes, they're about to go on tv to finally break the news to
the public and this government official is giving the astronomer some advice, saying 'look, you want
to state things very clearly, and remember, no math!'. and the scientist, very exasperated as the
train doors shut, says 'but it's all math!'. so that's one of the running themes, the scientists
are terrible communicators and the public isn't really listening. the two academics face three main
barriers when it comes to conveying their message. the first one is politics. they actually get called
to the white house to brief the president and in the movie they made the president a woman
which is really cool, unfortunately they also made her a complete fool. merryl streep plays
a ditzy politician who only cares about her political image, the midterms and the
optics. much of the comic relief also comes from jonah hill who plays a spoiled, out-of-touch
advisor who just happens to be the president's son. i thought the movie was really funny although
in my opinion the comedy loses a little bit of punch because the story is so close to reality
the second barrier to communication of scientific information is economics and corporate interests,
represented by a steve jobs-like tech visionaire that only cares about his company and his profits
and the third barrier is competing for the public's short attention span
the scientists manage to go on a popular tv show but the social media reactions focus on
how dreamy the astronomer is and how crazy and unhinged the graduate student seemed. memes and
remix videos go viral but they almost never focus on the substance of the message the scientists are
trying to deliver to humanity. throughout the movie the public keeps getting pulled in every
direction except the one that matters. celebrity gossip, pseudoscientific denial of the facts
and constant politicizing of the science. every distraction under the sun. eventually the
comet becomes visible to the naked eye and by this point the scientists are becoming a bit
more communication savvy so they start a campaign called 'just look up'. politicians immediately hit
back with a counter campaign called 'don't look up'. very transparent satire of denial of facts
as if not looking just makes bad things magically go away but so common in our society from covid to
climate change denial. my favorite part of the whole movie is that they made the scientists
very human, very flawed. the movie did not make the mistake of portraying the scientists as all wise
sages sitting atop a mountain dishing out pearls of knowledge. the two academics have very poor
social skills and the professor has a crippling level of anxiety. he ends up getting distracted
just like the public. over the course of the movie, he continuously gets seduced, both figuratively and
literally, by all the shining lights around him. he has an affair with a tv anchor, he struggles to
control himself during a critical launch operation and he even ends up selling out and featuring in
corporate propaganda. now, i'm not going to spoil the ending for you, i'll just say it's not the
typical hollywood ending which came as a pleasant surprise. to me this movie hits very close to home
because everything we do here is about science communication, trying to bring science directly
to the public. how do you take a world of bar graphs and p-values and confidence intervals
and communicate that in an engaging way to a general audience? the information can be completely
life-changing but if we can't package the story in a digestible way nobody cares. we see that very
clearly in my field of medicine, with an epidemic of largely preventable chronic disease just
ravaging western society. we have the solutions but we can't communicate them effectively. and
we see it of course with this pandemic, that has now killed millions of people all over the world.
many of those deaths, probably most of those deaths, preventable. scientists have come up with a number
of vaccines in record time and we can't get a large chunk of the population immunized. first
scientists warned us that letting the virus circulate through an unvaccinated population
would beget more aggressive variants, and sure enough we got delta. then scientists told us
you've got to vaccinate everybody, not just the rich countries, because variants will arise
in africa, in other parts of the world and then they'll make their way over here
and sure enough we've got omicron, that started in africa and now it's here wreaking havoc. currently
73 percent of covid cases in the US are omicron. so the crazy comet movie with dicaprio, not that
far from reality. if we can't figure out how to get politics and greed and ideology out of the way, we
don't stand a chance against viruses or climate change or the obesity epidemic. and scientists
bear a massive responsibility to improve their communication skills. tell people the truth without
patronizing, without sugar coating, treat the public like adults. that's what we're working on here
every day so keep giving us your feedback, because that's how everybody learns. and let me know below
what you thought of the movie, i'm really curious to hear your opinion. take care, see you next time