Don't Look Up

Director – Adam McKay

Writers – Adam McKay(screenplay by), David Sirota(story by)

2021 - USA

Stars – Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep

Current American MSM perniciousness and shallowness will be an extinction event.

Falls somewhere between Mike Judges’ ‘Idiocracy’ and McKay’s own ‘The Big Short’. Takes the guise of a hip screwball celebrity ensemble satire. A couple of university astronomers discover an asteroid aiming for Earth to wipe everything. However, American mainstream culture is ill-equipped to deal with this for its narcissism, short attention-span, greed, stupidity, political opportunism and vapidness. There’s enough here that upset the right Rightish people, but it is also preaching to the choir: its targets are so obvious that it’s never going to convert anyone. Mostly it’s just nodding along. And anyway, nothing will or can match the cartoonish mayhem and abhorrence of the source material. That is: it’s reflective rather than predictive. 

And mostly the human race goes to hell due to idiocy and self-interest, which means that the full reality and extent of behind-the-scenes nefariousness and manipulation is never addressed. There’s no Murdoch here, or a Roy family, which is surely a gaping lacuna, and an angle McKay is fully aware of having directed ‘Succession’.  

Of the cast, Mark Rylance strikes a chord the most with his almost android-like portrayal of a tech mogul that scuppers mankind’s last hope because he sees a money-making opportunity – probably thinking he’s too big to fail. The most surprising moment is when he’s called out by Dr Mindy (Di Caprio) and his demeanour turns on a dime into threatening without missing a beat. 

There are, of course, a few years’ worth of real world source material for ‘Don’t Look Up’ to draw from, from climate change denial to COVID response. Neil Morris summaries, “as the most risible responses to the virus outbreak become commonplace and normalized, sometimes it takes sardonic, albeit unnuanced allegory to snap us back to reality.” It’s not a reality snapping allegory but a distillation of the cultural problems that have made proper, clear responses to these apocalyptic threats possible. Chris Betram puts ‘Don’t Look Up’ as a ‘Dr Strangelove’ redux:

“Obviously satire, obviously really about our inability to act against climate change, but also about the comical inability of the United States to play the role it has arrogated to itself.” 

But it doesn’t feel quite as sharp beneath its broadness, never quite pulling out the insightful farce it wants to be. Yet it’s swipes about vacuous celebrity culture stymieing the media’s ability to discuss serious discussion hit home, as well as the fickleness and aggressive denialism of cultists and culture, etc. So it is far from subtle but, despite missing the mechanisations of deliberate aggressors, ‘Don’t Look Up’ gathers up enough principle ingredients and heavy-weight actors to be an interesting and entertaining commentary on the zeitgeist.