Astronomers Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence discover a huge comet on a course to collide with Earth six months down the line, and set about trying to convince the U.S. Government to take action to stop it. However the President is only interested in the coming elections, and the media treat their warnings of imminent global apocalypse as just too heavy for their entertainment output, so the while DiCaprio's character caves in and grabs his 15 seconds of fame, Lawrence's ends up a universal object of ridicule for letting her sense of despair show through in public.
It soon becomes patently obvious that the improbable comet is just a metaphor for climate change to allow the makers to forcibly, unambiguously drive home the point of the utter idiocy of those who deny it because they can't see it or understand it, because it's all just part of another 'fake news' conspiracy to them and because it's gloomy rather than fun and therefore surely the work of the 'wokerati'. So what's truly terrifying here isn't at all the contrived device of the doomsday comet, but the depressing credibility of the facile, moronic, self-serving political and public response to the crisis. The film can certainly be accused of heavy-handedness and bringing the big guns to bear on the viewer, such as Meryl Streep's scarily Trumpesque President, Mark Rylance's Zuckerberg/Musk self-styled tech visionary and a host of other OTT big-name cameos is almost overkill. But the ire is so justifiable and necessary that some degree of clumsiness is forgivable.
6/10
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