How do you make a movie about a hyperobject?

YOU ARE, AT THIS POINT, well aware of the crisis. Scientists have warned us, but we’ve doubted their data or dismissed them as alarmists. Politicians, preoccupied with transient election cycles, have neglected the issue, or else weaponized it in the culture wars. Large segments of the media have ignored it in favor of celebrity scandals, while corporations are profiting by obfuscating its dangers and thwarting possible solutions. And our puny brains, so ill-equipped to calculate future risks, have locked up like ungreased gears in the face of inevitable catastrophe.

The crisis in question is, more properly, crises — one metaphorical, one all too real. In Adam McKay’s new film , the fictional doomsday device is a huge comet, a “planet killer” that will obliterate the Earth in six months. The horrified astronomers who discovered it (played by Jennifer