One of my fondest memories of 1980’s television was the telecast of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos each week. I don’t need a Youtube recap to conjure the images of Carl Sagan in my mind, I just have to close my eyes, and there he is: Tall and handsome, with his golden-colored Turtle neck shirt and corduroy pants, standing on an embankment near the pacific ocean, with one leg on a boulder, his elbows resting on it, his quizzical brown eyes peering into the camera with intense and relaxed honesty, the sweeping ocean wind displacing thick black strands of luxuriant hair and send them tumbling across his face, which he would nonchalantly sweep back to position and continue talking with a composed passion about the Cosmos in a measured voice, with the right inflections and emphasis on words like ‘Billions’ and ‘Cosmos’, evoking strange long-forgotten resonances within the viewer. He held millions of young minds, like mine, in thrall.
Those thirteen episodes of Cosmos changed our perception of planet Earth, its place in the Cosmos ( the Greek word for Order in the Universe), and placed man where he rightfully belonged – A species living on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy ( paraphrased from Carl Sagan’s book “Cosmos”). The idea that we were an insignificant dot in the cosmos, yet capable of perceiving the beauty and the wholesome grandeur of it, and furthermore, all of this vastness and immensity could be explained without the need for any supernatural power – was staggering in its impact. For a Hindu mind, born and brought up in the company of thousand Gods and Goddesses, the blow went deeper. All of a sudden, the castle of Man’s uniqueness designed by an intelligent designer sitting up there in the heavens became questionable? Cosmos revealed for the first time ( definitely, for me) in an impactful manner that there are other planets, galaxies, solar systems, unimaginably far, measured in millions and billions of light-years( a light-year is the distance it takes light to travel in a calendar year. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second), that could be host to much more intelligent lives than ours. We are still probing, we may never know fully – such is the vastness. Our bloated sense of uniqueness, specially designed in God’s image, maybe turn out to be ultimate stupidity, our nemesis. Our presence here is a mere fluke, a fortuitous event, an accidental confluence of atmospheric conditions that beget the first stirrings of a wriggly, replicating cell that later torturously wound up as us. There is grandeur in this idea, and not fatalistic as many suppose. Perhaps, we should learn to be more humble, and less destructive. It took Carl Sagan, one of the greatest expositors of science, along with Sir Richard Attenborough ( who did the same for life on Earth) to shatter our complacency, question our anthropocentric delusions, and bring us out of our shells and question, look and wonder. That 80’s generation who watched Cosmos was never the same again. We cultivated a reverence for science, an open mind, and a deep curiosity. We didn’t dismiss God, but he became more of a hypothesis and less of an axiom.
I wrote the above two paragraphs as a preamble to discuss a new movie currently streaming on Netflix ” Don’t Look Up”. Not that a review of this movie deserves a profound introduction, but it may help to understand what the creators wished to portray. I will shortly enumerate the different strands of the storyline, but taken as a whole, the movie is about what would we do if we find out that planet earth is threatened by an extra-terrestrial object, traveling towards us at a good speed, and is of considerable size, and enough to wipe out life? Such cataclysmic events have happened in our geological past, so this is not entirely science fiction, this could still happen sometime in the future. For starters, the movie has a stellar star cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, and many others, each one, brilliant actors in their own right, but unfortunately together in this movie fail to make any impact. To me, their combined presence seemed jarring and wasted. Secondly, the movie is a satire on the current American condition, especially its skepticism about science and scientists in general – a side-ways dig at the anti-vaccine evangelists of the population. And third, the movie is a scathing criticism of the general population who prefer to have a good time, tweet, make memes, drink, and share concerns with each other over social media, but are really not interested in acting on any issues. Fourthly, there is a tech element to the story, with a character parodying someone like Tim Cook, who is portrayed as the rambling, mumbling tech genius making all the big decisions including those of life and death. And lastly, and more importantly, the movie is about the general apathy, insensitivity, and lack of basic understanding among the political cadres and the mainstream media, when serious and incontrovertible scientific evidence for an impending calamity is presented to them. The movie, I guess, was meant to be a satire; but in the end, it turned out as a parody of the times we live in. We can spot the men and women behind the roles, we can relate to the indifference towards science, amply demonstrated in the last two years. But beyond these occasional traces of truism, the movie offers nothing more.
The movie begins well. A research student at the Michigan State University ( Kate Dibiasky played by Jennifer Lawrence) spots an anomaly in astronomic data through the Subaru telescope. The steams of data on her screen clearly show a previously undetected comet several miles wide and dense traveling towards the earth at a steady speed. She calls her mentor ( Dr. Randall Mindy played by Leonardo DiCaprio) to check the graph and mathematics behind it. He confirms her assessment that the comet is on track to hit earth in six months’ time. And when it does, it will be an apocalyptic event. Both Kate and Mindy send the data to NASA for reconfirmation, and they validate the data too. Now from a mere scientific piece of evidence, the data has become one of global importance. So the team rushes to Washington DC to appraise the white house, and mobilize action. If we can act in time, it is possible that the trajectory of the comet could be diverted, and some precautions be taken to minimize the damage. When Kate and Mindt land in the Capital hoping to mobilize the government’s response and educate the people, they are surprised, annoyed, frustrated, and aghast at how everyone prefers to sleep-walk the problem and not see the gravity of the cosmic event. Nobody takes them seriously. The incontrovertible evidence presented to the administration and the people is treated as a joke, as passing daily news, a worthy of mention in a two-minute slot with commercial television, and nothing more. What happens next is the substance of the story.
The directors could have done better with this material, but unfortunately couldn’t. The movie is weighed down by the sheer star power packed into the screen. Meryl Streep as the distracted president, Cate Blanchet as the blonde and sultry News host, and of course the duo of DiCapri and Jennifer – the scientific crusaders, seem to pull in different directions, and for the most part, look out of place in the drama. The movie moves from one frame to another at a frantic pace, whipping up a range of a spectrum of emotions, with infidelity also thrown in for measure. The movie was meant to be a satire of the times we live in. However, the screenplay is too frivolous, lacking in depth to make it impactful.
For the first time, I wasn’t sure what Meryl Streep was doing in this movie. In all these decades I have been following her brilliant career, this performance must rank among the lows. She was simply not herself. There is a tired look on her face and the spontaneity was missing. It is possible, she wasn’t convinced of the material or her role, yet decided to through with it. The fine actor that Leonardo DiCaprio is, unfortunately, didn’t find his bearings right either in the movie. There is a constipated look on his face, throughout the movie. Understood, that for a scientist who peers in telescopes and screens and crunches data for a living, it is difficult to put on a cheerful face, but Dicaprio right from the word go seems unusually uncomfortable. For want of a better phrase, I will call it lack of conviction. Jennifer Lawrence was the saving grace. She represented the younger generation and their indignation well. But even she, for all her good acting skills, didn’t have much to do except show irritation and carried from one spot to another in the name of national security. More than once in the movie, the character kate expresses her frustration over the cheap behavior of a Three-start general, who charged a dollar for a free snack in the white-house.
The reason I thought of Carl Sagan when I watched this movie is he would have been very interested in the premise of “Don’t Look up”. Sagan’s 1985 novel “Contact”, a beautifully written novel about extra-terrestrial intelligence explored the theme of what is out there in the Cosmos. The book was later made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Jodie foster. The book and the movie brought out the grandeur and awe of living in a cosmos where we may not be the only intelligent species and also painted a realistic picture of the social and political impediments in accepting such a view. Scientifically speaking, like ET intelligence, it is quite possible that comets and meteors can enter our orbit anytime, and therefore we should be prepared to take such evidence seriously. But are we, as a generation, serious about science at all? Can we listen to the patient observations of our scientists when they report an anomaly in the data seen? In the last two years, we have witnessed first-hand how the drama of an epidemic and its science is playing out? Despite overwhelming evidence that the vaccine works, nearly half the globe still remains unvaccinated, and a new variant is slowly picking pace, disrupting the cycle of vaccinations. Don’t look up is the right film at the right time in the sense it aims to mock our narrow-minded, parochial view of life and goals. But in an attempt to pack too much into the film, it doesn’t manage to convey the core message well. That’s that problem.
God bless…
yours in mortality,
Bala