Video Throughput: Don’t Look Up Review By A Scientist
I’m back! And this week, I’m going over the science of Don’t Look Up the latest impact disaster flick. Much of what I talk about is also relevant to Deep Impact and Armageddon, which is why the video is so thorough.
As for what I thought of the movie as a movie … I’m clearly an outlier in that I didn’t hate and didn’t love it. I thought it was OK. There were parts that worked for me and parts that didn’t. It occasionally tries to be a bit too clever. But the ending is quite well done. As satire, I though it missed some fairly obvious targets, as I discuss in the video.
Spoilers
I wasn’t sure what it was doing with the media. The newspaper Mindy and Dibiasky go to first put them on the worst show imaginable to talk about their discovery and then abandons the story of the millennium after a single denial. Was that supposed to be a parody of the media?
The science was mostly decent. A few liberties are taken for the sake of drama with how fast the comet is confirmed. But the plan to deal with it and the danger it represents are reasonable. Isherwell’s plan to mine the comet is utter nonsense. But maybe that was deliberate? Hard to tell.
As for as impact movies gos, I would probably put Don’t Look Up a little above Armageddon and a little below Deep Impact. Of course, not everyone agrees:
— Alex Muresianu (@ahardtospell) December 30, 2021
Overall, Don’t Look Up comes with a reasonable recommendation. You might enjoy it, as long as you approach it with the right mindset that it’s a parody. But I doubt it’s destined to be a classic. And the Golden Globe nominations and Oscar buzz seem a bit much. But, as we always say in these parts, judge for yourself.
Very well done. I was hoping Professor Siegel would do a piece on this movie.
I too was skeptical at how fast they computed the comet’s trajectory. While I don’t know much, I do know a bit about numerically solving differential equations and how hard it is. This is particularly true when your input data is right-ascension/declination over a few nights. That’s a tough problem and you won’t get accurate results on a white board.
As an aside, everyone here (at least those of us who enjoy the video) should “like” the video on YouTube, and perhaps comment there. It will help with the YouTube algorithm for getting the video onto people’s feeds. I think Professor Siegel does great work and more people should get to see it.Report
Who amongst us has not lived through some version of the “But what do the Ivy League astronomers think?” Mine was after a phone call from the CTO at the giant telecom company where I worked, who said, “One of the SVPs who has refused to read your white papers is hiring Deloitte to write a recommendation on the big impending technology choice we’re making. Your job for the next six weeks is to be available to the Deloitte team every minute of every day to ensure they don’t put something completely stupid in their final report.”
Oh, and Christmas movies these days are intended to occupy the teenagers during the increasingly-long winter breaks they get from school, so their parents don’t go crazy.Report
One of my good friends who watched the movie thought it was fuhmazing. He didn’t think it was about climate change, though. He thought it was about covid.Report
WooHoo, shout out to WI!Report
Enjoyed this a lot.
Is “You can’t take the sky from me” a Firefly reference?Report
I described the movie to my Boomer dad and his partner thus: “Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio discovery a coment that’s going to wipe out humanity, and then they struggle to get people to care.” Now, she (my dad’s partner) in particular is pretty conservative so I wanted to gloss over the parody of the Trump White House, but I think I got the general sense of the movie right.
What’s great to learn from the Throughput, though, is how well the science worked. I recall thinking “breaking up the comet won’t do any good, it’s still going to weigh as much” and yes I realize weight and mass aren’t the same thing but I figure that was pretty decent scientific hole-spotting for a liberal arts major like myself. (Then there was the question of how exactly the navy was going to “catch” mountain-sized hunks of rock and metal while in the ocean, but one can mine underwater.)Report