Don't Look Up is a disaster movie for the climate change times

Don't Look Up, the new disaster movie jam-packed with stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Chris Evans, Jennifer Lawrence, Ariana Grande, Timothée Chalamet, Jonah Hill — and about a dozen more — starts similarly to any other disaster movie.  

A group of scientists toiling away in anonymity make a startling discovery: a comet is on a collision course for Earth, and they need to buckle down, come together and save humanity. 

But the difference in this particular disaster movie? Nobody cares. 

"I've been really terrified about the climate, the collapse of the livable atmosphere. It seems to be getting faster and faster," director Adam McKay said in an interview with CBC.

"Yet for some reason, it's not penetrating our culture. There's still this idea that it's just one of many issues, even though the science makes it very clear: this is the story in the history of mankind."

That's the message at the heart of Don't Look Up. Though the disaster isn't human-caused, McKay was inspired to co-write the script with journalist David Sirota after the United Nations' IPCC report's warnings of risks like "extreme drought, precipitation deficits, and risks associated with water availability" kept him up at night. 

WATCH | In Don't Look Up, scientists discover a comet heading for Earth and no one cares:

That's what makes this disaster movie unlike 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, San Andreas or Greenland. Instead of action-packed examples of escapism, disasterologists and literary experts say Don't Look Up — and other fiction like it — is the natural evolution of storytelling now that climate change is a real part of everyday life.

The apocalypse feels less like a distant nightmare and more like a real risk that lives right around the corner, so our stories are evolving to reflect it.

"I think you're going to see it start to show up in a lot of movies and a lot of storytelling, whether it's television or books or music," McKay said. "It's going to permeate everything"

Don't Look Up is far from the only disaster movie to pull elements of climate change into its plot. Going all the way back to Kevin Costner's Waterworld — the 1995 critical flop about a world underwater due to the melting of the polar ice caps — Hollywood has looked to a changing environment for its stories.

And Sherryl Vint, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California in Riverside, explained that responding to developments in the real world has always been an element of science fiction. Though the name "cli-fi" — or climate fiction — is a new invention, science fiction in particular has always reflected how technological and scientific changes can lead to apocalyptic or dystopian ends "if these technologies get out of our control."

There was a "huge boom" of end-of-the-world apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction in the 1950s in response to the invention of the atom bomb, Vint said, and then a heyday of disaster fiction in the 1970s in response to a "counter-cultural move towards Earth Day" and the beginnings of environmental politics.

What's changing now, she explained, is where those stories end up.