WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Don't Look Up, now playing in theaters and streaming on Netflix on Dec. 24
Don't Look Up doesn't have a central human antagonist so much as a society full of people who find ways to make a terrible situation even worse. But there's one figure who could have really seen the events that transpire in the world -- and absolutely failed to. And while there are plenty of sardonic commentaries about current society in the movie, perhaps the most surprisingly heartbreaking is a running gag around an algorithm that may have predicted the end of the world -- and was promptly ignored.
While President Orlean (Meryl Streep) is the primary roadblock to preventing Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), and Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) from spreading news of the impending doom caused by the comet, it's ultimately big tech inventor Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) who proves to be the key to causing the end of the world. It's his suggestion that scuttles the original plan to prevent the destruction of the Earth, as he's discovered a large swath of precious metals on the comet. He convinces Orlean to attempt a different plan, enacting a much riskier strategy that would allow them to mine the minerals. However, this plan fails spectacularly -- and Isherwell promptly flees the planet with Orlean in tow, surviving the crisis he helped escalate.
But he should have seen this coming. Earlier in the film, while confronted by Mindy over the importance of peer review over his technology, Isherwell verbally attacks Mindy as a small man standing in the way of progress. He even reveals that an algorithm he designed has predicted everything about Mindy, even estimating his likeliest cause of death. It's an impressive creation, and one that seems to be incredibly advanced, given a later gag. Orlean eventually asks how the algorithm predicted she'd die, and Isherwell admits it was something called a "bronteroc." They discover what such a creature is when they land on an alien planet in the post-credits scene -- where an alien Isherwell guesses will be called a bronteroc attacks and kills Orelan when she approaches it.
It's a silly follow-through on the gag of the algorithm, but it might also be one of the most effective versions of the film's ultimate message. The algorithm Isherwell designed is apparently so advanced that it could accurately predict the likelihood of an alien attack being the cause of death for Orlean, which is especially impressive because that means it needed to successfully predict she'd die on an alien world after spending thousands of years in cryogenic sleep before being killed. This means the algorithm was able to accurately predict the entire climax of the film, and Isherwell never even really noticed. He just looked at the end, and didn't pay any attention towards what else was in the prediction -- or more importantly, work to prevent it.
In essence, like with the rest of his inventions (and by extension the leadership of humanity), Isherwell created an amazing tool that could have saved the world, and he failed to use it properly. His selfish material desires overtook even his scientific curiosity, and now an amazing invention of his that could have warned him of the dangers of mining the comet instead of destroying it was ignored. The algorithm was an amazingly accurate creation, likely only missing Mindy's prediction (instead of dying old and alone, he's surrounded by his loved ones when the comet strikes and kills them all) because of the actions he himself took to accidentally change them by allowing the comet to strike the Earth.
It's the ultimate message of the film -- humanity has created amazing things that it then failed to save itself with, having used all this amazing technology for petty causes and selfish goals. The internet spreads the message of doom but instead turns Mindy and Dibiasky into memes. A call to unite humanity with a singular message results in bad actors using it as fodder to galvanize conflict. All the rockets in the world mean nothing if the person commanding them is more focused on getting rich than on saving countless lives. The algorithm might have been warning Isherwell the whole time about his upcoming failure, but he was too busy using it to intimidate people to look at the findings properly. In the end, it's a good running gag that also serves as a cutting commentary on human progress.
To see the algorithm in action, Don't Look Up is in theaters now and hits Netflix on Dec. 24.