A Closer Look

I've seen a small uptick in online articles about the movie Don't Look Up, as the collective response to it keeps shifting. The movie is seen as an award contender. Except it's terrible. But that's only because people don't like its message. Or they love the message, but don't like the way it's delivered. Or so the evolving discussion goes. Well... I decided to see it for myself.

Don't Look Up is the latest from writer-director Adam McKay, who follows up The Big Short and Vice with another dose of anger, this time leavened with more comedy and satire. A comet is on a collision course with Earth, with just six months until humans are made extinct. But the astronomers who discovered the threat struggle -- repeatedly -- to get anyone to take the problem seriously.

If you look at this movie as a righteous cautionary tale, you might well compare it to the famous Network. If you're approaching it as satire, you might think of Idiocracy. In some ways, Don't Look Up is worthy of comparison to both. This is an unabashed metaphor for climate change denialism, and even more so for the capitalist profit motive that stands in the way of addressing the issue. The problem for me is that the satire feels set at something like a 7 out of 10.

This movie was written in 2019, and amazingly became out of date before it was even made. The original outbreak of the coronavirus delayed its planned shooting schedule; it was ultimately filmed in the period before vaccines were widely available, and was only released right before Christmas. But in 2021, our world became almost as dumb as this movie imagined. The utter idiocy surrounding any measures to mitigate the unchecked spread of COVID variant after COVID variant has made this satire of climate denial look too realistic. We're now not only in a world of anti-masking and anti-vaxers, but one of paste eaters (for horses) and urine drinkers.

In this world, Don't Look Up isn't nearly wild enough.

Yes, it's still funny at times. The cast is huge, and great from top to bottom; my favorites include Meryl Streep as a sort of female Trump, Jonah Hill as an idiot Trump Jr., Cate Blanchett as a devious-vapid talk show host, Mark Rylance as an obnoxious tech billionaire, and Timothée Chalamet as a surprisingly nuanced burnout. But yes, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Rob Morgan, Tyler Perry, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Paul Guilfoyle... they (and more) are all good too.

Don't Look Up is right there on Netflix, so easily accessible. And I think many who read my blog would like it. But before I watched it, I had sort of assumed that its middling Rotten Tomatoes score was a true average of the people who were praising it and loudly dunking on it. Now that I've seen it myself, I think that score is closer to an accurate reflection of what I thought of it. I'd give it a B-.