Please note, this article contains information on the plot and the outcome of the film “Don’t Look Up”.
From his first appearance in the film, unease sets in. Mysterious, visibly inhabited by thoughts inaccessible to ordinary people: in Don’t Look Up, the character of Sir Peter Isherwell quickly emerges as the “brilliant” brain which leads humanity to its doom. This movie directed by Adam McKay (The Big short, Vice) is currently breaking streaming records on Netflix, and denouncing inaction on climate change. The catastrophe here takes the form of an asteroid which is regarding to strike the Earth.
This tech billionaire desperate to advance humanity on the path he has chosen for it is brilliantly played by Mark Rylance (The Bridge of Spies, Ready Player One). He wears the film alongside Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett, Ariana Grande and Jonah Hill, all at their best. Much smarter than the President of the United States, satire of Donald Trump sprinkled with Sarah Palin, the wealthy boss is the only one whose intelligence is up to the crime: he cancels the American mission to save Earth in the hope of making a monumental profit from mining the asteroid’s rare minerals, which it promises to fracture before it crashes. The media see nothing but fire.
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Musk, Jobs, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Branson
At the head of the mega-company Bash, which recalls Amazon and therefore its founder Jeff Bezos, Peter Isherwell is as tyrannical as Steve Jobs was, the brilliant founder of Apple, from whom he also seems to be inspired by the sickly obsession for smartphones and a certain taste for “keynotes”, these millimeter speeches during which we promise an audience already conquered that life will be better if it buys yet another high-tech device. Discreet, it displays – without us knowing if it is feigning them – communication disorders that evoke autism and, once more, certain geniuses of Silicon Valley.
The massive use of personal and private data of the entire population, including those who are not registered, obviously recalls the scandals that have affected Facebook, and pushed its founder Mark Zuckerberg to change the name of the company to Meta, in reference to the main site of the social network, the metaverse. Thanks to his algorithms, Isherwell is able to tell anyone when and how they are going to die (and he does not deprive himself of it).
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Eyes to space
The character shares a love for space technology with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and one would almost expect to see the SpaceX and Blue Origin logos point their noses. We also remember that man is a “sir”: like Richard Branson, the British billionaire who founded the Virgin Empire and its space subsidiary, Virgin Galactic.
Extremely confident in his technologies to solve all the problems of humanity, as decision-makers often think in the face of the extinction of living things and climate change, he has however planned a back-up solution: a vessel is ready to embark on a sea. other planet those who deserve it in his eyes. A way of remembering that the very rich do not feel concerned by the approaching cataclysms …
