The new film Don’t Look Up opens with the whistle of a boiling kettle. That whistle might be the last subtle metaphor in this so-called satire. Director Adam McKay has teamed up with some of America’s biggest stars to deliver this uneven, unfunny and uninspired mirror of American culture in a misguided attempt to slap Netflix subscribers awake to the dangers of climate change.
DiCaprio stars as a professor of astronomy and Lawrence stars as his PhD student who discovers a comet heading towards earth that will cause an extinction level event in roughly six months. Alerting NASA, they are immediately flown to the White House to inform the president of their discovery. President Orlean (Streep) and her Chief of Staff son (Jonah Hill) meet the news with jeers and derision as bad news of this nature would surely disrupt the mid-terms in three months.
See, the self-preserving reaction from the obvious Trump/Trump Jr. analogues is meant to be surprising, scathing and so absurdly depressing that it becomes funny again. Except it, like the rest of the film, is none of those things (save depressing) because McKay and story partner David Sirota may think they’re parodying or mocking real life, but they’re merely mimicking it. Ariana Grande singing We really f*cked up in her song “Just Look Up” is no more ridiculous than the emetic “Imagine” video. Jason Orlean (Hill) repeatedly calling his mom hot isn’t parody so much as role reversal. (Is it even funny?) The “fireworks” challenge in which people shoot fireworks at their own face just doesn’t hit the same in a post-Tide Pod world, you know?
What follows is a predictable pattern of comet-denial, incompetence, avoidance, corruption, greed, inaction and disaster, all depicted in McKay’s flashy, faux-documentary style that worked well in The Big Short but becomes a cudgel for his message here. For all its accuracy (if you can’t equate the comet with climate change, then some other C-word of current events should ring familiar), its entertainment value is weighed down by its heavy hand, some strangely off-the-mark choices, main character miscasting, and excessive length.
What little does work in the film is limited to a running bit about free snacks, a touching dinner scene, and Mark Rylance’s sublimely weird performance as tech mogul Peter Isherwell. As a stand-in for Jobs, Bezos, Musk, etc., Isherwell is a truly off-putting alien of a person who sees himself as so above his fellow humans that they confuse bored disdain for quirky aloofness. He is one of the only unique, interesting and heightened characters that manages to truly mock its subject.
There’s a scene toward the end of Don’t Look Up where DiCaprio’s character is reciting to Lawrence’s character the lyrics of a song while the lyrics are being sung on the radio. You want her to stop him, to call him out for this supremely annoying behavior. That’s how this movie feels. We are Jennifer Lawrence, this movie is Leonardo DiCaprio, and the song on the radio is the absurd, seemingly satire-proof times we’re living in.
