Don’t Look Up (2021)
dir. Adam McKay
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Netflix
Marshall McLuhan said it best, “The medium is the message.” The way something is said is as important, if not more important, than what’s actually being said. What McLuhan was getting at was much more complicated, but you get my point.
To wit: I’ve struggled with my weight my entire life. More than a decade ago, after a lot of hard work losing almost 100 pounds, I thought I had The Answer. My self-righteousness and smugness led me, on one occasion, to basically scream at my father that my family was worried for his health if he, too, didn’t lose some weight. I’m deeply ashamed of the way I behaved on that day, and I doubt I could have chosen a less effective way to make myself heard. The medium was the message, and the way I delivered mine was absolutely counterproductive.
As with his previous films The Big Short and Vice, director Adam McKay’s insufferably smug tone, and a level of nuance that’s about as subtle as a piano falling from a third-story window, make his climate change satire, Don’t Look Up, about as effective as me screaming at my dad to lose weight. His film also suffers from being overstuffed; it careens from one ridiculous scenario to the next with wildly uneven results.
I need to add the same disclaimer that I appended to my review for Vice – and, for that matter, The Big Short; it seems this will be a running theme for my reactions to McKay films going forward. I whole-heartedly agree with the point McKay is making and the urgency with which he’s making it. But the way he’s chosen to go about it is the worst example of holier-than-thou preaching-to-the-choir sanctimony. It undercuts his own goals.
Don’t Look Up begins with astronomy Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky making an initially extraordinary, then terrifying, discovery. She has found a new comet rocketing through the sky. While verifying Kate’s data, her advisor, Dr. Randall Mindy, makes a sobering realization. The Dibiasky comet, as it will be known, will smash into earth in a little over six months. The size of the comet and the devastating impact will end life on earth unless immediate action is taken.
Except Don’t Look Up isn’t really about a giant comet threatening to destroy our species. The enormous space rock is a thinly veiled analogy for what we’re doing to ourselves via the runaway green house gas effect and global warming. McKay – who wrote the screenplay and co-created the story with journalist David Sirota – gleefully skewers everything from politics to cable news to tech billionaires in his parable.
On the politics front, U.S. President Janie Orlean is dealing with a sex scandal involving herself and her nominee for a United States Supreme Court vacancy. A complete incompetent – she’s made her dimwitted son, Jason, her Chief of Staff – Orlean cares only about optics. She initially blows-off Dibiasky and Mindy’s grave briefing about the comet until she realizes that rallying the country behind her to stop the extinction-level event will distract from her current scandal.
Orlean is nakedly meant to be Trump. She’s an opportunist who only notices something on her radar when she thinks it will help her personal fortunes. Part of the reason McKay’s satire misses the mark is because Trump himself ensured that satire is dead. After witnessing the moronic scandals of the Trump administration – Sharpiegate, anyone? – it’s become hard to laugh at a “heightened” version of the same thing, since the genuine article was every bit as, if not more, absurd.
I wondered to myself in the notes I took while watching Don’t Look Up if contemporary critics had the same reaction to the release of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, widely regarded today as one of the best political satires ever made. The difference between Kubrick and McKay is that of emotional distance. Strangelove – and, to a large extent, every Kubrick film – soars mostly because you get the feeling while watching it that the person in charge doesn’t have a dog in the fight.
Kubrick practiced a sort of nihilistic stoicism within his films. He had no hope in the better angels of human nature, but you got the sense that it didn’t much bother him. His job was to observe and report, and he did so with the cool objectivity of an impartial observer, which often lead to bleak, soul-shattering comedy.
McKay’s brand of satire is diametrically opposed to Kubrick’s. He is deeply invested in his viewpoint, and he will do anything to make sure his audience knows it. Often that’s to the detriment of his picture’s effectiveness.
In a tweet, McKay tried to insulate himself from criticism by conflating reactions to his movie with concern over climate change itself:
“Loving all the heated debate about our movie. But if you don’t have at least a small ember of anxiety about the climate collapsing (or the US teetering) I’m not sure “Don’t Look Up” makes any sense. It’s like a robot viewing a love story. ‘WHy ArE thEir FacEs so cLoSe ToGether?’”
It’s exactly that sort of smugness that has made his last three films so unbearable.
The director also undercuts his own goals by aiming his bazooka at too many targets. The screenplay for Don’t Look Up is a bloated mess. When Dibiasky and Mindy can’t get anyone at the White House to take their warning seriously, they go to the media. The members of that world prove to be as vainglorious and shallow as those in Washington. The vapid media is personified in Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer, the co-hosts of a morning news show called The Daily Rip, which plays as half Morning Joe, half Live with Kelly and Ryan.
The film makes some salient points about our culture being obsessed with keeping away sad or distressing feelings, usually with the aid of anesthetizing social media and technology use. At least, those points would have been salient if we weren’t constantly awash in sad and distressing news, especially in the last two years. Our culture thrives on vapid, disposable entertainment, but Don’t Look Up doesn’t offer anything more incisive about that problem than making fun of the people awash in it.
The subplots within Don’t Look Up are too numerous to count. In the least interesting one, the one that derails any momentum the movie has built, Dr. Mindy begins a torrid affair with Brie Evantee, who proves to be as empty as her on-air persona. I was left completely uninterested in the half-hearted romance subplot, and it needlessly bogged down the rest of the movie, which clocks in at nearly two-and-a-half-hours.
Ditto my reaction to the half-assed love story McKay shoehorns in for Kate Dibiasky. After being black-bagged and taken off the grid for a second time – there’s a running gag in the movie where President Orlean has troublemakers whisked away with a bag over their head, only for them to be inexplicably set free in the next scene – Kate loses hope and takes a job at a convenience store. She meets Yule, a burnout who enjoys shoplifting.
I had no rooting interest in this subplot, which comes in the film’s third act, but neither does the movie, really. The best thing about this otherwise disposable love story is that the fantastic Timothée Chalamet turns up as Yule. Chalamet makes the most of the handful of scenes he’s in, but even his commitment to the bit – he sports a preposterous wig and has the appearance of a 90s skater kid – doesn’t justify the character’s inclusion in the movie.
The rest of the cast for Don’t Look Up similarly go for broke, with mixed results. Chameleon character-actor Mark Rylance is in top form as socially awkward but ruthless tech billionaire Peter Isherwell. With his preposterously gleaming white capped teeth and a voice that registers somewhere between a whisper and a mumble, Rylance’s Isherwell heads the BASH company, which has recently released a phone that will automatically play a cute puppy video for you if it senses melancholy in your biorhythms.
Isherwell is President Orlean’s top donor, and he orders her to call off the attempt to knock the comet off its trajectory once he discovers how many billions of dollars of precious minerals it contains. Rylance is unrecognizable as Isherwell, and his send-up of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is on point.
Like with Trump’s killing of satire, though, it’s hard to laugh when real-life mega-villain Bezos built a superyacht so tall that the city of Rotterdam is contemplating partially dismantling a historic bridge at Bezos’s request so he can fit this gaudy monument to his own phallus under it.
Leonardo DiCaprio does his best imitation of a nebbish man of science as Dr. Mindy. Jennifer Lawrence steals almost every scene she’s in as Kate Dibiasky. She delivers a hilariously earnest line reading of “I gotta go get high,” when she realizes she has discovered the comet that is going to kill all life on earth. Jonah Hill’s performance as the Don Jr.-esque imbecile Jason Orlean is woefully calibrated. It feels like McKay simply let Hill go for as long as he liked, which usually leads to his character trailing off, or to McKay’s editor, Hank Corwin, cutting him off mid-sentence.
Corwin wins the award for MOST EDITING here, which comes across as grating and distracting. Composer Nicholas Britell – I adored Britell’s ethereal work with Barry Jenkins on Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk – brings the necessary energy to keep up with what’s happening on screen in Don’t Look Up. His brassy, jazzy theme is electric.
Climate change is an existential threat to humanity. I think McKay misses the point slightly by making his analogy to the climate crisis a giant comet that will wipe out life on Earth in the blink of an eye. Left unchecked, runaway climate change will lead to an unimaginably hostile environment that will lead to more inequality – as the rich can further insulate themselves from reality – but, instead of disappearing in an instant, we’ll muddle through like we humans always do, even when the circumstances are shatteringly bleak.
Adam McKay has a right to be alarmed. We all should be. But the tactics he employed in making Don’t Look Up won’t achieve his desired outcome. His heavy-handed, smug approach will never resonate with those who need to hear the message the most. His over-the-top, throw-everything-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks satire will cause everyone else to treat the movie as one more diversion, which is one of the things he’s railing against in the first place.
Why it got 3 stars:
- This star rating was a tough one for me (insomuch as I think star ratings actually matter). If you read me regularly, you will probably know that I consider worthy of your time any movie which I give a three-star rating or higher. So, Don’t Look Up is right on the cusp. What got it over the hump for me was how important the issue of climate change is. While I find McKay’s artistic aesthetic obnoxious, I stand behind pretty much everything he’s saying here.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Are you familiar with the concept of hyperobjects? McKay named his production company Hyperobject Industries, and it’s so fitting.
- There is one through-line joke about a US military general charging Kate for White House snacks. After paying him, she discovers that the snacks are actually free (because, duh, it’s the White House). She becomes obsessed with why a high-ranking military leader, making (presumably) a good salary, would want to make a couple bucks off of snacks. I couldn’t ever decide if I thought this running gag was hilarious or idiotic…
- The BASH press conference/product unveiling with the kids surrounding Isherwell is fantastic. I nearly fell out of my chair when one of the kids asks if she can say something and Isherwell responds with a curt, “No.”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- You can see Don’t Look Up in a few select theaters around the country, but it’s also available with a Netflix subscription, which is how I watched it. I saw it a few months ago, but didn’t have plans to really wrestle with it until it received an Oscar Best Picture nomination, which led me to watch it again in preparation for writing the review.