The world, as most moviegoers know, is at its most beautiful and most terrifying at the moments when it is going under: when mile-high waves buckle the spiers of Manhattan Island;

when the earth opens up and Los Angeles sinks;

when meteors part the sea or glowing metals shoot up from the earth's core.

One can hardly defend oneself against the terror.

And yet, when the film comes to an end, you feel a good mood that comes from the fact that out there, in reality, everything is miraculously undamaged.

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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A reasonably credible apocalypse is budgeted by the film studios these days with at least 200 million dollars - and Adam McKay's apocalypse film "Don't Look Up" deviates from the norm of the genre not only because of its comparatively low costs: it should be less than a hundred million have tasted, which hardly any viewer will perceive as a lack.

Because the film owes its added value, as all the director's declarations of intent and most of the viewers' posts in the usual networks suggest, to the interpretation that is generally accepted as correct and binding, according to which, once the credits have rolled, nothing is the same out there: The Doomsday will come, for reasons the film described.

Except it's going to be a little longer than Don't Look Up's 138 minutes.

A PhD student in astronomy (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a comet, her professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) calculates the trajectory and the size: The chunk is ten kilometers thick and will collide with the earth in six months, which, if no miracle happens, it will end of human civilisation, possibly even all life on the planet. And then the student and the professor try to warn the people, alert the media and urge the President (Meryl Streep) to bombard the comet with every available nuke to knock the giant thing off its trajectory. Which unfortunately fails because people simply have other concerns. They find the professor sexy but the student hysterical. The media makes quota with a sex scandal of the President.Politicians don't want to stir up panic. And on social media, everyone is too moved by a pop singer's (Ariana Grande) love story to pay attention to the end of the world.

The catastrophe in fast forward

The comet, you have to understand it, is a metaphor as big as Mount Everest - and when Adam McKay talks about his film and its message, he only enlarges and coarsens this reading: Politics is completely rotten, the media be amoral and cynical and the people who form their opinions in the Twitter or Instagram bubbles are on the way to idiocy. And that's exactly how the film is perceived in these networks: as satire about conditions that would in turn be satirical if they didn't amount to an ecological catastrophe. As a slightly exaggerated re-enactment of overall contexts in which Donald Trump actually became president and people have other priorities than saving the world. As a time-lapse version of the catastrophe that threatens us.Except that you understood that after an hour and a half, but the film then continued for another three-quarters of an hour.