10 Great Movies Where the World Literally Ends
4. Don't Look Up (2021)
A cautionary and often heavy-handed tale for our times, Adam McKay's Don't Look Up puts the USA at the epicentre of impending doom, as one of the only nations with the power to really avert global-scale crisis, but with a media, population and political establishment wholly unwilling to do so.
In the post-truth, fake news era, opinions are worth more than fact, and everyone has enough to fill the airwaves morning to night.
On the edge of this, we find Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), astronomers from Michigan State University, who implore everyone to get a handle on things and address the asteroid currently on a collision course with Earth, and which promises to create an extinction-level event. The media, politicians and their base react as expected, not just denying the threat, but the very existence of the asteroid, which becomes a larger feature in the sky every day.
McKay's timely apocalyptic comedy shows just how far certain social and political ideologies can take our divided modern society, right up to the very literal end of the Earth, when all the inaction and tit-for-tat becomes redundant.