Leonardo DiCaprio Tackles The Climate Crisis In Netflix Satire “Don” t Look Up “

The actor Leonardo Dicaprio signed a contract to star in a movie by Netflix about a comet that threatens to end life on Earth, because it seemed to him an urgent analogy of the prevailing climate crisis.

The dark sátira “Don”t Look Up” It also has DiCaprio with the star of “The Hunger Games”, Jennifer Lawrence.

In it, they are both astronomers whose warnings of impending catastrophe fall on deaf ears in a starkly partisan and divided America, led by an incompetent president played by Meryl Streep.

Fresh from the UN COP26 Climate Change Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, DiCaprio said Adam McKay’s script solved the “almost impossible” problem of making a thriller about a crisis that “evolves throughout a century”.

“How do we as a species, as a society, as a culture, politically, face an impending Armageddon?” DiCaprio asked a Los Angeles preview audience on Thursday.

McKay “cracked the code, so to speak, on how to put into a two-hour format all the craziness with which we as the human race are responding to this crisis,” he said.

The film, which also features performances by Ariana Grande, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance and Jonah Hill, hits theaters on December 10 before airing on Netflix starting on Christmas Eve.

Director McKay, whose broad career spans the cult comedies “Anchorman” and “Step Brothers” and the satirical plays “The Big Short” and “Vice,” has become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after directors.

Criticism of “Don” t Look Up “is under embargo, but the initial reaction on Thursday was effusive. Clayton Davis, of the show’s bible Variety, predicted it would have” a seismic impact “on the Oscars race.

DiCaprio said he hoped the film “would start to create different conversations,” but admitted he was not very optimistic about humanity’s ability to solve the climate crisis.

“Especially after coming back from Glasgow and seeing compromises that can be changed by the next wacky administration coming in and taking us out” of the climate deal, he warned.

After two weeks of painful negotiations, nearly 200 countries reached a global agreement to fight climate change, but fell short of what science says is necessary to contain the dangerous rise in temperature.

The planet has “a very limited time,” DiCaprio said. “And if we don’t do something, we know the result. We know the result,” he said.