Review: 'Don't Look Up'
“…a film that so heavily buys into its own importance that every attempt to hack our sympathy feels hollow and condescending.”
Film critic David Sims of The Atlantic skewered last year’s modern take on Cinderella, calling it “an extinction-level cringe event.” The latest from comedy big wig Adam McKay can accurately be described as such. Following his political-capitalist ventures of The Big Short (2015) and the deliriously incoherent Dick Cheney biopic Vice (2018), the director seems to be slipping further away from the absurdist comedies that, ironically, made bigger impacts than his recent efforts. Don’t Look Up is further proof that the more McKay ties himself to weightier material, the more he’s caught in a downward spiral of deadening filmmaking. The disaster feature, now nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, is the product of a director working in the wrong genre—or just clumsily combining many.
Dr. Randall Mindy and PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) are astronomers who have just discovered a massive comet hurdling toward Earth—one big enough to destroy the entire planet. Compelled to share the devastating news with the world, they set up White House meetings and media appearances only for their news to be softened or outright rejected with denial and humor. Do people simply not understand the gravity of the situation or are the reasons for their denial more insidious? McKay wastes no time in taking aim at how even the most dire of situations become politicized and commercialized until they’re all but ignored.
Don’t Look Up’s portrayal of humanity, sadly, rings true: an entitled species that never considered its own extinction to be a possibility. Even when faced with the worst case scenario, we turn away from what’s in our best interest in favor of our trivial day-to-day preoccupations. The entire planet may be on the chopping block, but McKay seems to be taking aim at a distinctly American tendency to deem something untrue until it bites us in the ass. As a satire, every aspect of the film is exaggerated, but the arrogance, selfishness, and obliviousness displayed by the determinedly ignorant public are still frightfully familiar. So if the film’s commentary is sound, what’s so disastrous about it? The problem is how much pride it takes in its own obnoxiously obvious metaphor, resulting in a film that so heavily buys into its own importance that every attempt to hack our sympathy feels hollow and condescending.
Aside from its smugness, sitting through Don’t Look Up is a thoroughly exhausting experience. A major issue that plagued Vice is here as well: its incessant editing. Rather than coming across as purposefully hurried or impressive in juggling its narrative threads, it feels slapdash and thoughtless. Its careless and disjointed construction demonstrates an inexplicable aversion to crafting full scenes, which comes across as an attempt to obscure its half-baked ideas. The whole thing may be one big joke, but we’re never given the opportunity to reckon with the tragedy underneath it—at least in a genuine way.
At the end of the day, all we’re left with is a self-congratulatory tragicomedy that’s neither sad nor funny, a socio-political critique too brash to be effective or scathing, and a shoddy piece of filmmaking that undercuts its own message by handling it with as much subtlety as, well, a natural disaster.
Director Adam McKay
Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance
Release year 2021 | Runtime 2h 23m
Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content.