Mark Reviews Movies: DON'T LOOK UP

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 9, 2021

The ongoing global pandemic has put a few things about human nature, politics, and the efficacy of government into perspective, and too much of that perspective, unfortunately, isn't too good. Writer/director Adam McKay clearly took some lessons from this crisis, too, and they're on full display in Don't Look Up, which imagines what contemporary society's response to certain, impending planetary devastation might look like. One can gather pretty quickly that it isn't going to end well.

McKay's movie is a comedy, as one could anticipate from the filmmaker's previous work. In theory, that approach exists within a fine, time-honored tradition of laughing at our foibles, even as they seem set to bring about some form of destruction. The specific problem of McKay's satirical tale is that his characters are not merely flawed. They are, to one degree or another, idiots—inept, incapable, and self-involved to a point that there's barely anything recognizable about some of them by the end.

It's good for cheap and easy laughs, to be sure, especially early into this story. It begins with Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), a PhD candidate at a state university in Michigan, discovering a previously undetected comet. After some celebration, she and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) crunch the numbers of the comet's trajectory, and a goose egg in Randall's calculations—the ones determining how close the object will get to Earth—put a damper on the festivities.

This comet, about 3 to 6 miles wide, is a planet-killer. In just a bit more than six months, the space rock will strike Earth, causing a mass-extinction event that will be equal to or worse than the one that killed the dinosaurs.

When Randall relates his findings to NASA, he and Kate are whisked away to Washington, DC, where they wait with Dr. "Teddy" Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), the head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (After one of our scientists asks if that's a real thing, McKay stops the story to announce it is and show us the logo, in the only moment that seems to care about the reality of such a scenario). At the White House, they wait and wait and wait some more, because President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) is currently dealing with some bad news about her Supreme Court nominee (news that becomes amusingly worse as time passes).

One can gauge the aim and approach of McKay's comedy once the scientists actually do get a meeting with the President. Katie quietly fumes and panics, while Randall stammers and goes long-winded on the science behind the discovery. None of their end of the conversation makes much sense under the circumstances, especially when the cool, calm, and collected NASA scientist is sitting in room right with them.

The President doesn't seem to understand the severity of the situation at hand, or maybe she does and genuinely believes the response can wait until after the upcoming midterm elections. As for her son and chief advisor Jason (Jonah Hill), he's just a jerk, tossing insults like an antagonistic stand-up comic working on his heckler material.

The running joke, of course, is that no one understands or cares about the imminent death of most life on the planet—from the government and the administration's cynical politicking, to the news media and their insistence that everything has to be good news or get good web traffic numbers, and to a business world that wants to keep the stock market rising and, eventually, sees the comet as a potential boon for obtaining rare materials. We have seen some of this response in our own crisis, obviously, and maybe that's why McKay feels the need to bump the absurdity of the reaction to this imagined one to such an extreme.

The news industry here is represented by Brie (Cate Blanchett) and Jack (Tyler Perry), a pair of insufferably smiley morning show hosts, and to emphasize the apparently intelligent Randall's stupidity in this mess, he ends up having an affair with Brie and takes his newfound stardom as the "hot scientist" to heart. Meanwhile, the business side is represented by technology mogul Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), a quiet little dictator who jumbles his words together. He's the one who decides that the comet is an untapped resource for economic growth, putting a sudden and improbable end to the effort to destroy the cosmic object.

There's little logic to any of these attitudes and decisions, which, obviously, is McKay's point (Later, the country is divided between people who think the comet is a problem and others who buy the line that mining it will create jobs, think the doomsayers are exaggerating, or don't even believe the thing exists). Recent history mirrors some of the filmmaker's assertions, but there's a fine line in satire between what's recognizable and what isn't.

Since McKay is primarily going for laughs here, he crosses that line toward the latter with a bit too much ease and too often (Let's hope he does, at least). Don't Look Up may make some cutting points about the broad ways people and systems react to a crisis, but the movie's comedic approach is far too broad for it to feel as if it cares about these things.

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