If you enjoyed Vice for its sledgehammer-to-the-forehead approach to its subject matter, Don’t Look Up, the latest film from director Adam McKay and his co-writer David Sirota, might be right up your alley. It is as unsubtle and unfunny as any soi-disant satire can get, lacking both the humor and the power of the genre in its rush just to tell you how smart it is, and in the process, it wastes an epic cast that includes five Academy Award winners.
The premise of Don’t Look Up isn’t actually that bad: Two astronomers (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) discover that a comet 6 kilometers wide is on course to make a direct impact with earth, just off the coast of Chile, an extinction-level event that will wipe out all of humanity. They go to the feds, and end up talking to the President (Meryl Streep), who doesn’t take them seriously until she needs to distract everyone from a scandal. But when the CEO of an Apple-like tech company called BASH (Mark Rylance) who is also a major donor to the President points out that the comet holds over $100 trillion in rare metals critical to the technology industry, the plan to destroy the comet shifts to a plan to try to break it apart and mine it, much to the chagrin of the science community that believes destroying the comet is the planet’s only hope. (Cate Blanchett is the fifth Oscar winner in the movie, playing a vapid morning show host as a sort of Megyn Kelly clone.)
There is one funny joke in all of Don’t Look Up, and it has to do with snacks. Nothing in the actual plot, which is so thinly veiled a metaphor for climate change that it might as well be covered with Saran wrap, is handled in a humorous way. This isn’t actual satire. You don’t just move the chairs around and claim you refurnished the house. The writers here just changed a few details and then made everyone a genius or a moron, with nothing in between. The closest thing this film has to a real character is DiCaprio’s Dr. Mindy, who gets to evolve after his appearance on Blanchett’s morning show results in him becoming a heartthrob, both to viewers and to Blanchett’s character, with whom he cheats on his wife (Melanie Lynskey), another thinly-veiled commentary, this one on the corrupting power of fame and the conflict between telling people the truth and telling them what they want to hear. Even that seems to give this script more credit than it deserves, and it takes well over two hours to get to its eventual, obvious ending.
What’s most appalling is how McKay manages to get such awful work from otherwise capable, acclaimed actors. Rylance appears to have botoxed his upper cheeks into oblivion and affects a fey, high-pitched voice, while his character also has the social skills of a sea cucumber. Jonah Hill, playing Donald Trump Jr. by another name (the President’s son and also her chief of staff), is in full douchebro mode, and serves no purpose whatsoever except as a way to mock his real-life counterpart as an insipid misogynist. Blanchett’s co-host, played by Tyler Perry, is every bland TV personality who laughs too much and makes tasteless jokes about ex-wives.
And perhaps worst of all is Meryl Streep, who mailed this one in and had it returned for insufficient postage. She’s supposed to be as corrupt as Trump, but manages to make the character less interesting, somehow. She’s venal in the most boring way, and while, yes, there’s a comeuppance coming that you will see an hour away, it’s not even that satisfying because the character is such a cipher, and Streep, who has certainly had fun playing offbeat or even unlikeable characters before, seems disinterested.
As for the film’s so-called point, whether it’s just about climate change or a broader argument about humans’ inherent tendency to avoid short-term pain even for long-term gain, this isn’t going to convince anyone of anything. It’s preaching to – or just yelling at – the choir, while talking down to anyone else who might be willing to hear an argument on the matter. The writers would rather tell you how smart they are and take your compliments than do anything that might make a difference. When the protagonist also turns into a rhinoceros, you’ve taken the farce too far.
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This is easily the worst film nominated for Best Picture this year, of which I have now seen all ten. My personal top ten for 2021, which could still change a little depending on some movies I haven’t seen and a few that aren’t available yet, looks like this:
1. Drive My Car
2. Dune
3. The Lost Daughter
4. Licorice Pizza
5. Parallel Mothers
6. Summer of Soul
7. The Power of the Dog
8. Passing
9. Red Rocket
10. C’mon C’mon
Isn’t that the point of the whole movie, to show how awful half the population is? I don’t think the movie was supposed to be any kind of cinematic masterpiece being well acted.
Completely agree with everything you wrote.
I was stunned when people seemed to like it, even while admitting it was so on the nose.
Just a waste of what should/could have been an excellent actual satire or film, ruined by a blunt sledgehammer.
You asked on West Side Story on what grounds people should remake a film – well this one certainly after enough time has passed and we still haven’t addressed global warming – let’s remake it in the way it should’ve been made all along.
I wasn’t that much of a masochist and only got less than halfway through before I started skimming.
For me the film fell into an uncanny valley of being played too straight in places to seem like satire but too unsubtle and over-the-top to be taken seriously as straight disaster-flick entertainment, but that wasn’t the real reason I disliked it.
It skewers the vapidity of celebrity culture with relish, but to whatever extent it is a metaphor for climate change celebrity vapidity isn’t the problem. Our failure to do anything about climate culture is really a story of staggering elite failure, but the “serious” members of the political class are let off the hook.
I too was initially surprised that so many people liked it,* but the fact is that our political establishment – e.g. the sort of people you might see at events like the WHCD – seem to be the people Mckay wants to amuse with easy shots at celebrities an Trumpers, when they are the ones who deserve to be under fire. No wonder they liked it.
(*Unless like mom you made a point of watching it drunk with friends, which probably helps a lot of would-be comedies. They thought it was hilarious.)
Felt compelled to watch this as a Real Life Scientist(TM), and did not enjoy this one. Too on the nose sometimes considering our current rampant denialism, but not funny enough to escape into the satire. Plus, none of the characters were likable to me, so I didn’t really care what happened in the end. On the other hand, my FIL loved it. He also loves Bill Maher. So I’m guessing that’s the target audience.
I feel like this would’ve been a terrific 20 minute short film, but extended to feature length it’s just an exercise in beating a dead horse.
Jonah Hill’s unscripted riffing wore thin a long time ago, but this movie had both him and Streep doing it. Their scenes were disastrous.
My top ten of ’21 so far:
The Worst Person In the World
Pig
The Dig
Stillwater
Licorice Pizza
The Card Counter
The Power of the Dog
The Last Duel
Drive My Car
Bergman Island
I know I’m very late to the party on this thread, but I wanted to get my 2 cents out anyway: I don’t understand the criticism that it’s bad just because it’s somewhat obvious. Satire has to be understood by the audience or it doesn’t work. This isn’t Russian literature, it’s a movie. Is there supposed to be some “aha” moment near the end of the film where we all slap our foreheads and say, “oh, it’s climate change!”? And how would being more subtle improve the movie or it’s chances of actually getting the message accepted by the people who are denying climate change to begin with? I thought being so obvious and on the nose was its strength. We’re living the satire. If you wrote a character like Trump before he became our reality, viewers would dismiss him as totally ridiculous and cartoonish. How could they make the movie more outlandish than the world we’ve been living in the past 10-15 years?