An edited
film review by Vince Mancini for UPROXX on Dec. 18, 2021.
Don’t Look Up, from Vice / The Big Short director Adam
McKay, is a well-intended satire, about how American politicians and tech
titans wouldn’t be able to stop being venal and self-interested long enough to
save themselves, even if there was a comet heading straight for Earth. Think Armageddon in the style of Veep.
While
McKay, who began his career as a director of goofy comedies, like The Other Guys and Stepbrothers, still knows how to structure a joke, his sensibility
often feels too dated for a cutting satire of modern media. Don’t Look Up is a strong idea (with
story credit to McKay and journalist David
Sirota), and lots of the individual jokes work, but at times it gets so
caught up trying to make fun of so many different things that it seems to lack
an internal logic. Satire in and of itself isn’t quite a story.
Jennifer Lawrence plays Kate Dibiasky,
a doctoral student with severe art bangs who discovers a massive comet (a planet killer, as it’s described later)
late one night while singing along to Wu-Tang during her shift manning the
Subaru telescope. Dibiasky, who feels very much like a middle-aged white man’s
idea of cool hipster, eventually
alerts her Michigan State Univ. doctoral thesis advisor, Dr. Randall Mindy, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a dowdy beard and enjoyably dorky Midwestern
accent. Together they make the rounds, trying first to inform the government,
then the public, all in an attempt to get someone to do something about it.
Their
tour takes them first to Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, head of NASA’s Planetary Defense
Coordination Office, which a title card informs us is a real office that
actually exists. Rob Morgan plays
Oglethorpe, an enjoyably idiosyncratic character who probably deserved more
screen time than he gets.
McKay
pulled this same sort of fourth-wall-breaking shtick in Vice and The Big Short,
and I do enjoy it, within reason. It makes sense to be clear that the Planetary
Defense Coordination Office is a real thing, because it sounds like something
this kind of movie would invent (the Subaru Telescope is apparently real too,
maybe that could’ve used a title card). The bigger issue in Don’t Look Up is that there’s a kind of
dissonance between its extremely on-the-nose elements (aping the font and color
schemes of MAGA hats and posters) and its unnecessarily fictionalized ones. In
a scene in which a social media consultant discusses the engagement Mindy and
Dibiasky received during a morning show segment, real social media platforms
are all bowdlerized as VroomVroom, Friendlink, Rabble, and Diddly, in a
way that feels almost deferentially courtly. Why not just say Facebook and
Twitter? McKay doesn’t seem like a guy afraid of offending Mark Zuckerberg.
And
again, those site names don’t really land as jokes, partly because they feel
like parodies of sites from five or 10 years ago, not ones five or 10 years
from now. For a director who clearly loves shooting montages of memes and
tweets, McKay doesn’t seem to have that solid a grasp of what makes a great
tweet or meme (in fairness he does do clickbait headline parody quite well).
By
contrast, the hosts of the morning show on which Dr. Mindy and Dibiasky appear
are played enjoyably, by Tyler Perry,
who for all his corniness as a writer/director is still a pretty damned solid
comedic actor, and Cate Blanchett,
in a set of unnaturally white veneers and over-the-top TV makeup that somehow
still make her look hot. She plays a sort of fake-dumb-blonde, cosmopolitan rich girl
getting her bag on TV, as a satire of Laura Ingraham, Greta Van Susteren, Megyn Kelly, Stacey Dash, Martha MacCallum or Kayleigh McEnany.
Meryl Streep is similarly great
as President Orlean (a callback to her playing Susan Orlean in Adaptation?), a sort of careerist hybrid
Trump/Kamala more worried about the midterm elections than she is about the
impending apocalypse. Her chief of staff is her dopey son, played wonderfully
by Jonah Hill in what feels like a
combination of his Inside SoCal character from SNL (Dad, it’s just a kicker) and his own clean and rad and powerful emails.
Just
when it seems like Dibiasky and Dr. Mindy have finally gotten the president to
act, she gets sidetracked by Peter Isherwell, a robotic tech tycoon played by Mark Rylance in another solid turn, as
a character who’s clearly a riff on Jeff Bezos, with shades of Mark Zuckerberg
and Jack Dorsey. The whole story turns on this shift, from the president’s
decision to go with Isherwell’s pie-in-the-sky plan to not just deflect the
comet but get rich from it, rather than follow the recommendations of
scientists. It’s the defining shift of the movie, and also kind of where it
falls apart.
President
Orlean becomes not just a careerist, but a pseudo-climate denier, with her new
slogan, Don’t Look Up urging
supporters to ignore the reality of the killer comet. It’s easy to see what
point McKay is trying to say here, about leaders putting profits ahead of
saving the planet and treating a global crisis as just another geopolitical
game, but plot-wise it doesn’t quite track. Ariana Grande, playing a fictionalized version of herself, has a
come-to-Jesus moment and tries to help get the public to care, releasing a song
about how she wishes she’d listened to the scientists. Aside from her character
being vaguely sketched, science is real
feels like the kind of yard sign liberalism McKay is normally above. More broadly,
individual characters’ motivations and story arcs get short shrift in favor of
trying to lampoon as many things as possible.
The
classic Hollywood idea was that a global crisis would force an end to our petty
squabbling, as seen in movies like Armageddon
and Independence Day. This was
probably based on the general cultural takeaway from World War II, that when
the chips were down, we’d eventually come together and kill the fascists. (the Fourth of July will no longer be known
as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: ‘We
will not go quietly into the night!')
Now
that we’ve seen plenty of crises that seem to have the opposite effect,
factionalizing the populace, polarizing our experience of objective reality and
seemingly driving everyone insane, it has manifested in our fiction. Children of Men and The Leftovers saw its characters slide into magical thinking,
hostility, and cultism in response to societal upheaval, borne out in real life
with things like QAnon and people getting really into crystals.
Don’t Look Up clearly wants to be
the comedic, more overtly satirical The
Leftovers, but its satire is too backward looking. And whereas The Leftovers was always
character-first, Don’t Look Up feels
more like a series of sketches. Lots of those sketches are reasonably funny,
but they don’t always maintain a consistent logic. [Mancini’s rating: 2.5 stars
out of 4]
Blogger's comment: While Meryl Streep did a reasonably good job as President Orlean, I would have cast Alec Baldwin doing his famous blonde comb-over and gotten Brooklyn Decker or Alice Eve to play his well-endowed blonde daughter. But that's just me.
Labels:
comedy, drama, Netflix, satire, sci-fi, tragedy
IMDb 73/100
MetaScore (critics=50, viewers=57)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=62, viewers=80)
Netflix
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