DON’T LOOK UP Squanders Stars and Premise in Equal Measure
Long after the heat death of the universe (A.K.A. “The Big Chill” or “The Big Freeze”), humanity will be at most a distant memory to whatever other sentient species takes our place. All of work, commercial, artistic, or otherwise, will be gone as as well, irrevocably erased from time and memory. The end of humanity, however, might come sooner than anticipated, the result of hubris (ours), self-delusion (also ours), and unfettered corporate capitalism (also, alas, ours), either through a long-ignored climate crisis, a global pandemic science can’t deter, or, more likely, some combination of the two. It’s a sobering thought, of course, but for writer-director Adam McKay (Vice, The Big Short, Stepbrothers, Anchorman) and his latest Netflix-financed film, Don’t Look Up, the end of humanity is nothing more or less than a source for farce and satire, albeit modestly funny, middling farce or satire.
Semi-farcical approach aside, Don’t Look Up joins a relatively short list of big-budget, end-of-the-world disaster movies that stretch back to 1979 and the lightly regarded Meteor, through 1998’s disaster duo Deep Impact and Armageddon, and on through last year’s surprisingly grounded Greenland. Following decades-old precedent, McKay crams Don’t Look Up with a mix of established stars, starting with Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as, respectively, Dr. Randall Mindy, a Michigan State astronomy professor and Kate Dibiasky, a Ph.D student; fellow Oscar winner Meryl Streep as Janie Orlean, a relentlessly superficial, ratings-obsessed, Trump-like president of the United States; and Oscar-nominated actors like Jonah Hill as Jason Orlean, the president’s chief-of-staff (who doubles as the president’s failson) and Timothée Chalamet as Yule, a spiritually minded skate-punk.
As co-protagonists, Mindy and Dibiasky function primarily as Don’t Look Up’s viewpoint characters. When they discover that a meteor the size of Texas that’s headed for Earth will create an Extinction Level Event (ELE) if and when it collides with us in roughly six months time, they do what any astronomy professor and student would do: They reach out to a high-level NASA contact, Dr. Clayton ‘Teddy’ Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan). In turn, Oglethorpe gets Mindy and Dibiasky a face-to-face meeting with the sitting U.S. president. Rather than reacting with alarm or even concern, President Orlean frets about what this kind of news will do to her party’s chances of holding the House of Representatives in the upcoming election.
With Orlean ignoring their warnings, Oglethorpe convinces Mindy, a man perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and Dibiasky, uncomfortable in public, to make their case for the end of the world by appearing on a morning talk show co-hosted by Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett), a slithery, self-interested bottle blonde, and Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry), an annoyingly cheery, avuncular dude. Their show specializes in good news all the time, with a singular focus on the lives, loves, and musical output of pop celebrities. The appearance goes exactly as predicted: They’re ignored and ridiculed on social media, their pleas for action and activism dismissed or turned into meme fodder.
Don’t Look Up is everything but nuanced or subtle. Either because he implicitly distrusts the viewers on the other side of the screen he’s partially critiquing or he believes in his own towering intellect, McKay peppers Don’t Look Up with bits of sledgehammer satire, taking broad swipes at everything from a failing, celebrity-obsessed mainstream media to national politics that favor policy-free, feel-good soundbites over potentially unpopular action, and on through the self-destructive social media addiction that feeds on both. McKay introduces a not unfamiliar wildcard into the narrative via Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), a tech billionaire modeled on the late Steve Jobs and provocateur Elon Musk.
A walking, taking caricature, Isherwell represents another incredibly easy target for McKay. Smug, self-entitled, and self-confident to a superhuman degree, Isherwell reflects the worst excesses of the tech billionaire class, and something far worse: The tendency of tech billionaires to be treated by super-fans and the media alike as omniscient, omnipotent messiah-like figures. Isherwell promises not just hope, but tech-based miracles, and for practically everyone in Don’t Look Up, that’s more than enough to justify ignoring the impending end-of-days and going about their daily business. (The title derives from the president’s latest field-tested motto and accompanying song used to pacify and mollify an otherwise anxious public.)
All those targets are certainly worthy of ridicule or mockery, but McKay too often relies on the easiest, laziest attempts at humor, going big and broad at every opportunity, grinding minimally funny jokes into the ground through ceaseless repetition, and letting individual scenes drag on interminably for no apparent reason except the director’s desire to work with some of the world’s biggest movie stars (and/or his friends) and give them something to play. Everything Don’t Look Up does or tries to do, however, has already been done and done better. The downer, downbeat result is as much about what McKay tries to say about humanity (i.e., we’re doomed) as the potential inherent in the material that McKay wastes repeatedly.
Don’t Look Up opens theatrically on Friday, December 10th, and streams on Netflix on Wednesday, December 24th.
