The Gospel Coalition’s Cringe Movie Takes: Don’t Look Up

One of the most cringe elements of Big Eva is their attempts to shoehorn Christian messaging into pop culture. I wrote about this with when Christianity Today posited that the mediocre Star Wars spinoff, The Mandalorian, could help you navigate a faith crisis. Now The Gospel Coalition is arguing that Don’t Look Up helps us learn how to share the gospel in our culture, in an article titled, ‘Don’t Look Up’ and Sharing the Gospel in a Distracted Age. In reality, this is a bad take movie review shoehorned into winsome Big Eva content.

Don’t Look Up is probably the worst movie of the ten movies nominated for best picture. It is so unfunny, I was offended by how unfunny it was when I watched it, and I grew up watching Adam McKay’s comedies. Yet it was also not serious enough to compensate with the dramatic element either.

Still, the message falls flat among the viewing public. They’d rather think about celebrity gossip than death and planet-killing comets. The tepid response to Randall and Kate’s urgent, existentially important message holds lessons for Christians trying to share the gospel in a culture of numbing division and constant distraction. Pastors and evangelists today know what it’s like to try to convey a message most people are too distracted or apathetic to hear.

So what are we to do? How can Christians effectively communicate a message of eternal significance in a spectacle-filled world that trivializes everything?

Not every pop culture experience needs to be an object lesson for our faith, and certainly not every movie review needs to have a faith message woven into it. If The Gospel Coalition, more specifically its writer Israel Soong want to do a movie review, do that. But let’s not dress up a poor review and call it an article about evangelizing.