Headscratchers / Don't Look Up

• Why was everyone at the end naked?
  • Either it was a requirement for the pods or their clothes deteriorated inside the pods sometime during the 22,000 years.
  • During his presentation, Isherwell's ramblings include a line about "mankind walking naked into a golden age", so it's probably another one of his crazy "revolutionary" ideas.
• In a similar vein, why did they not think to take any weapons with them? Since they knew they would be going to a planet capable of supporting life, it would be a fair assumption that there might be life on said planet already, and it might be hostile to colonists arriving from space.
  • Perhaps the ship did have weapons, tools, and other equipment on board; the passengers just didn't take them when they went outside for the first time.
  • And besides, the theme of the movie isn't that rich and powerful are responsible, foresighted people.
• If the plan by BASH and the White House was to break up the comet so pieces would land harmlessly on Earth for their natural resources, then why was there a whole "Don't Look Up" comet-denial movement at the same time from DC? I know the movie is supposed to be about criticizing climate change denial, but how do they both deny and plan to exploit the comet at the same time?
  • This is Reality Is Unrealistic. This may be a satirical reference to climate change examples such as oil companies denying climate change publicly while patenting inventions to take advantage of the changes
  • The "Don't Look Up" campaign was not about denial but a way to prevent mass hysteria so that the plan to mine the comet could go through without any backlash. Here's the president during her campaign speech:
    "And do you know why they want you to look up? Do you know why? 'Cause they want you to be afraid. They want you to look up because they are looking down their noses at you. They think they're better than you. Don't look up!"
  • The "Don't Look Up" campaign can also be seen as a parallel to some political leaders who, for financial reasons, were resistant to COVID-19 Pandemic lockdowns and safety measures. "Ignore the impending disaster so we can continue to make money."
• Where on Earth a civilization essentially similar to our current one, that is struggling to destroy a comet, has the technology to go to populate another planet? I know it's a movie and a satire, but this last part of the plot comes straight out of science fiction and out of nowhere at that point. It's like if an ancient civilization (Greeks, Romans, you name it) were struggling to contain the destruction caused by an active volcano and, suddenly, after failing, the elite takes a Boeing 717 plane to go to another continent. In addition to the apathy of the characters, it made the plot of the movie even more pointless and nonsense, just for the sake of jokes and punchlines at the last minute. In order to have that kind of technology, huge scientific advances would had already taken place, and society would have been very, very different from ours. Moon and Mars bases or colonies would exist by then, thus guaranteeing some sort of an already exoplanet human survival, not to mention the cryohibernation technology. Destroying a comet directed at Earth would be by then an easy problem to solve.
  • It seems to be another example of the movie's criticisms of classism. As you say, the fact that the technology for a Sleeper Ship exists suggests that science has advanced to the point where these things are possible, but greedy tech developers like Isherwood are too busy hoarding all the best stuff for themselves to share it with anyone who isn't a billionaire. It's akin to real-life urban legends about the cures for diseases like cancer and AIDS existing already, but pharmaceutical companies being unwilling to share those cures so they can continue to profit off current drugs and treatment programs. Your last sentence is a great summary of the entire movie: destroying the comet was an easy problem for world governments to solve, but the stupidity, short-sightedness, and selfishness of the elite (and their subsequent manipulation of other classes) kept them putting it off until it was too late to do anything about it.
    • Yes, that could be the message, but I thought that the movie aimed for the idea of what would happen if such a comet collision would take place in the present day with the current technology and society, and the sleeper ship was completely science fiction, the kind reserved mainly for more futuristic settings, essentially anachronistic, without explanation, and took me off guard. But well, I guess the message overcomes logic in this movie.
    • The movie is actually about climate change and many of the world's wealthiest likely have the ability to move to places so that they are minimally impacted by the event. A billionaire can buy up Alaskan mountain property and still live a life of luxury while the rest of the world goes to war over massive migrations and dwindling resources. The sleeper ship in the movie is a metaphor about the elites of society being willing to make big gambles like with the comet because they have a "plan B" that isn't available to the rest of us. The movie also makes it a point to show that the elites might be able to save themselves but that doesn't mean they can save humanity. A bunch of out-of-shape middle-aged or elderly oil tycoons are not going to be able to rebuild society and their escape plan ended up being just as short sighted as their attempt to harness the comet. Yes it is a tonal shift and probably would have been better off being handled by a secret deep bunker but at the point the movie was basically over and they were just going for more dark comedy instead of realistically sticking to the setting.
    • That's a good point. I guess the writers/directors needed to find a way to hammer home the message "The elites who claim to care about you will abandon everyone to save their own skins," and the only way to do that was have them escape the planet. It definitely strains credulity, but I suppose you could argue that the fact that no one else in the world noticed an asteroid the size of Mount Everest heading directly for Earth also counts.
    • BASH is consistently displayed as having more advanced technology (the drones and their Technobabble-heavy explosive system for starters) than is publicly available in our world. Of course, none of it is properly tested, and indeed more than half the cryopods kill their inhabitants, not counting the droppods that are shown crashing. But if you, say, dusted off the old plans for Orion-drive spaceships, you probably could build a ship that has the theoretical specs to travel to another solar system, if neither resources nor safety testing are a concern to you. That said, the ship even making it out of the debris field around earth should probably still be chalked up to the Rule of Funny of having the President get eaten as predicted.
  • They do have the technology to solve the problem easily. First with the rockets and then with the drones. The rocket mission was aborted out of greed and the drones failed probably because of lack of previous testing and peer review due to BASH arrogance. In any case having the technology to build a STL starship doesn't really makes easier to deal with the comet, is not like they would reach it faster (if anything the ship is probably slower than the rockets and drones as is bigger and heavier) and the other technology that they have and doesn't exists in real life is cryogenics but, again, that helps in nothing to deal with the comet. Science A is not Science B.
    • To piggyback off them having the technology to solve the problem easily — if they didn't abort the first mission, Earth would have had several weeks to spare if it succeeded, and the movie heavily implies that it would have — it should be noted that, in the real world, we presently don't. At all. The world of the movie is science fiction taking place 20 Minutes into the Future, where they not only have the advanced technology to stop an asteroid like that, but they can also do so with barely any prep time (even if we had the tech right now, astronomers think we'd need 5-10 years to identify the threat and execute a decent plan of action).
• Was the joint India-Russia-China deflection mission deliberately sabotaged by BASH?
  • It was never shown in the film that the failure was sabotage, but there has been speculation by other Tropers that it's definitely possible. As already pointed out in the YMMV and Fridge pages, the United States has had a history of meddling in the affairs of other countries including their enemies. Plus, Isherwell and Orlean would have a vested interest in the India-Russia-China mission failing with the latter having the resources and people at her disposal—black ops and spies—to make it happen. Given that Orlean used the FBI to illegally kidnap two people and make them sign a gag order (depriving them of legal council and legal due process), it's definitely possible.
    • It may also have been Isherwell recreating Stuxnet, a virus that in the real world appears to have been specifically designed to destroy Iranian uranium centrifuges by exploiting unknown vulnerabilities in the control software. With the near-ominipresence of BASH network products in the movie's setting, and Isherwell's demonstrated willingness to exploit his company's resources to remove obstacles from the path of his plan, finding a computer vulnerability (or outright using a backdoor he made himself) is certainly in character for him.
  • On the other hand, it's just as possible that the mission was put together hastily and the failure was due to a component failure or something else. By the time the three countries were about to launch their own mission, they had been incredibly short on time because they were expecting the USA to take the lead on resolving the issue and been cut out of the effort by Isherwell. On top of which, even black ops have people who would know better than to interfere with preventing the extinction of the human race.
    • In other words, the mission failure boils down to either deliberate sabotage by the USA or just being in such a hurry that they missed something critical.
    • And some might think that trusting black ops people to not interfere with a mission to prevent the extinction of the human race is incredibly optimistic...
• Why didn't BASH simply try to steer the comet into a non-threatening orbit (possibly by attaching rocket thrusters to it) and mine it there, instead of trying to break it apart and letting the pieces fall in the ocean?
  • Probably because Isherwell and Orlean didn't think of it. Or the energy needed to steer the comet was more than just breaking it apart.
  • Given that greed is a recurring theme in the movie, it could also have been a cost-savings measure — dropping a fractured comet into the ocean and then recovering the pieces is undoubtedly a lot cheaper than shuttling miners and minerals back and forth from Earth.
• While certain rare minerals are indeed very valuable for their use in modern technological applications like smartphones, if we suddenly got access to a massive new supply of the stuff, it would cease being so valuable. Why did they say it would be worth twice Earth's GDP if it was no longer scarce?
  • Access is a keyword here: the metal would be in the hands of a single entity, who will control the distribution, not easily available. It's still more complex, but the prices still wouldn't just drop.
  • This may very well be intentional on the movie's part, since Orlean is vapid enough to accept anything that sounds good to her voters, and Isherwell is self-centered enough to upsell any plan that would benefit his company, since after cutting out other nations of the mining proceeds, BASH would now have an exclusive and nigh-unlimited supply off the raw materials his gadgets need.
  • Price and value may be being confused. If a comet full of rare minerals and metals suddenly landed on Earth it would increase the wealth of the planet drastically, as measured by the amount of goods and services it could produce. While the price of gold would go down, more things, and thus more wealth could be created, like using it for wiring. If manna fell from Heaven enough to feed the whole the world no one would freak out about farm prices, as by eliminating hunger it would create a much greater value, imput, wealth, or GDP. For example, the discovery of huge, easily exploitable oilfields in Texas, Russia, and the Middle East didn't hurt the world economy, but built up global GDP by giving us access to cheap energy and chemicals.
• I don't really get this movie. How does no one stop Orlean or Isherwell at any point in any of this? Would the military, for example, really allow them to jeopardize the fate of the planet like they did?