In the wickedly funny Don’t Look Up, filmmaker Adam McKay and a host of movie stars hit the bullseye as they target a corrupt political establishment, a souless media and a gullible, lazy-minded public.
The satire begins when an astronomy grad student (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a new comet, and her professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) calculates that it will certainly strike Earth in 6 months and 14 days. This is a very big comet, so the scientists have pegged it as an “extinction level event”. In other words, the approaching calamity is apocalyptic enough to rule out any post-apocalyptic movies.
They get an immediate audience with the President (Meryl Streep), and they expect that their news will trigger an urgent, globally-coordinated effort to deflect the comet before it can end life on Earth. That rational and responsible response is not what they get. (Then again, you wouldn’t expect that vaccinating everyone against a deadly pandemic would be controversial, either.)
Instead, they find a public consumed with celebrity fluff and eager to turn any substantive conversation into tribalism. And a very greedy capitalist, who steers the US response into the ultimate example of privitization.
The media is represented by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as the hosts of a popular television infotainment show. Expert in cynically dumbing down every subject, Blanchett and Perry are hilarious every time they are on-screen. Never sexier in a movie, Blanchett also gets to play a sexually voracious social climber (“I’ve slept with two former Presidents“).
McKay’s takedown of the media includes a televised meltdown worthy of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network.
Other comic highlights:
- Mark Rylance as a tech billionaire, kind of a worst case cross between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. He bullies his way through every situation with a forced confidence (although mere mortals in his presence are advised “not to make eye contact and to avoid negative facial expressions”).
- Noah Hill as the President’s son, Chief of Staff and Brat-in-Chief. This is what the Trump kids would be like if they were witty. ‘You’re the working class, and we’re the cool rich.’
- Ariana Grande as a vacant pop diva who is ultra savvy about social media.
- Lawrence’s grad student just can’t get over a general’s (Paul Guilfoyle) scam with snacks.
- Melanie Lynsky plays the astronomy professor’s long-suffering wife, and no one throws off a muttered killer line better than Lynsky.
In The Big Short, McKay took us inside the subprime mortgage scam. His genius was in taking the story of guys in front of their computers figuring out the current and future values of other people’s home mortgages. – and turning it into an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Watching The Big Short, we laugh, and then we get mad.
Don’t Look Up is very funny but is it a somber prophecy in the clothes of a comedy? It’s very plausible that everything really would happen this way. In fact, the human response to Climate Change IS NOW happening this way (although it will take more than six months and 14 days to end life on the planet). And our rocky test drive with COVID does not inspire confidence, either.
This one of the Best Movies of 2021. I saw Don’t Look Up in a theater, but it will be streaming on Netflix beginning December 24.
