Adam McKay’s career has transformed into something really special. The curator of some of the funniest movies of the 2000s transitioned pretty seamlessly into America’s satirist du jour, taking that ability to make jokes and direct them at the powerful forces in society today. Don’t Look Up is his latest, grandest attempt at that skewering. Even though the results aren’t as potent as The Big Short, Don’t Look Up gives me hope that McKay’s got his camera pointed in the right direction, and I hope he keeps the record button on while he finds more institutional hypocrisy to mock that can elicit some anger and mobilization of the populous. Or at worst, give us a killer Ariana Grande pop song.
During her PhD studies, Michigan State student/astronomer in training Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a previously unknown comet in the sky. She immediately reports this finding to her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), where they both calculate the trajectory of the comet. Alarmingly, they discover the comet is on a collision course with Earth, sometime 6 months from today. They report this to government official Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), who gets this information up the chain to the President Orlean of the United States (Meryl Streep) and her son-in-law Jason, Chief of Staff (Jonah Hill). In addition, the astronomers go on a PR campaign to alert the world of their findings.
The scope of Don’t Look Up is crazy wide. I mean, to solve a global crisis, you need to cover a global response right? McKay and David Sirota’s targets include but are not limited to: media filtering of information, corporate greed, scientific discourse, social media, celebrity culture, government incompetence, corporate/political corruption, facts vs feelings, clickbait. That’s a lot! Too much in fact. That many targets means we get no time for nuance: this is blunt force trauma comedy. Characters are bascially one note archetypes meant to deliver a critique. So when it works, Don’t Look Up hits really hard, like watching the truth get watered down because of public relations concerns, like the tragic Dibiasky pilloried and humiliated for simply stating the truth right the correct emotional response, and the President capitalizing on the comet only because of a PR issue. But when the satire doesn’t connect it’s a waste of time, like Cate Blanchett and Leonardo DiCaprio’s fling of a romance, which offers no insight whatsoever. What results is an uneven movie, unclear of which targets to hit. Perhaps that’s an allegory to civilization’s response to a crisis, but it doesn’t make for great filmmaking.
Timing is a funny thing though. When McKay and DiCaprio talked about making this movie together, they intended the movie to be an allegory about climate change…right around the time Covid-19 showed up. McKay and David Sirota’s satire applies just as well to the pandemic, showing just how hard it can be to mobilize a populous to collectively achieve one single minded goal to prevent a global catastrophe. Political campaigns around looking up vs. looking down sound pretty similar to the mask/no mask campaigns in the 2020 election. The ideas and criticism inside Don’t Look Up comes across as a prescient, sobering reminder that we might well be truly f*cked, past the point of no return as human beings, to come together and fix problems. Tonally this can be hard to swallow as a movie making you laugh a lot, but its necessary to sound the bell, and maybe, Look Up when everyone is telling you not to for a second to find the truth.
Don’t Look Up keeps you laughing at how bummed out you should be. I’m also bummed because inside the movie is something special that McKay swung and missed at. But I remain hopeful that he’ll get there eventually. Keep punching up Adam, fellow Second City Improv Comedian alumnus!