Review: Don’t Look Up
Arguably one of the last movie stars on Earth, Leonardo DiCaprio dials it back to play a reserved midwestern professor and father of four. Unfortunately, it seems like a bit of a waste to have that performance used here. His Peter Finch moment in Network aside, Don’t Look Up doesn’t feel worth his time. Base recognition of things that happened doesn’t register as sharp political commentary. Mere replication of the things that spur outrage isn’t provocative or incisive commentary. Yes, politicians and the wealthy don’t care about anything more than money or power, but that’s not new or worth spending two hours to tell us about. Don’t Look Up started as a response to climate change, but the film was charged by a large swath of America using the last two years to simply ignore scientific evidence as a response to COVID. Adam Mackay clearly has a lot on his mind, and a film about two astronomers trying to warn everyone on Earth about an impending meteor strike seems like a good inroad for satire, but this is all-tell-and-no-show.
McKay’s use of frantic editing and vantage point changing is a barb at the hyperactive society we live in, but it’s more likely to be confused as just bad pacing. The gallows humor in Don’t Look Up is strong enough to support itself and films like Dr. Strangelove have survived on that alone. Meme-ifying and star-casting every minute of the film just means the film resembles the type of mindless entertainment it tries to eviscerate.
Asking Meryl Streep to play a Trump-esque figure but if she were Meryl Streep is too odd to find amusing. Jonah Hill and Mark Rylance make the grade as the President’s idiot son/chief of staff and a deranged tech billionaire (is there any other kind?), but everyone else on hand is dialed up to eleven. Specifically, that wreck of a Good Morning America parody featuring Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry that evolves into a scene straight out of Network. The Big Short was a blend of uncomfortable truths and comedy that made the medicine go down easier. Don’t Look Up is all bile. Comedy that features punching-up is all too rare, yet this isn’t the project that does it efficiently. It’s hard convincing people to change their minds when you call them idiots. But maybe the point of Don’t Look Up isn’t to provide a “come to Jesus” moment, maybe it’s just closing your eyes and welcoming annihilation with open arms.
