Netflix presents or Netflix presents, considering this movie came out on Christmas Eve 😁 I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 2022 (and let the record show, I was the first to make that Taylor-Swift-pun), but there’s one more stop before we can wrap this year up with a pretty little bow. Adam McKay has gathered two heavy-hitters for Don’t Look Up, in Leonardo Di Caprio and Jennifer Lawrence, and this movie will feature as their only performances of the year. It’s as special as it gets, and I believe it’s their first time working together too. Then, throw in an all-star cast with Jonah Hill, Meryl Streep, Mark Rylance, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, and Ariana Grande, and what are we waiting for!
Astrophysicists Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo Di Caprio) have discovered a new comet (hooray!), hurdling towards Earth, and set to make disastrous impact in around six months’ time (boo!). This movie follows their journey as they try to get the word out, warning the citizens of the world, whilst working with the American government and other established organisations to neutralise the threat before certain imminent catastrophe. In recent years, director Adam McKay has forgone nonsense-comedies with Will Ferrell to pursue biting satirical content based on the real-world events – I can’t remember that much about his last movie, Vice, but I think I found it aggressively myopic, even though I should’ve been on board with shaking my fist in dismay at Dick Cheney; I was very surprised that the Academy recognised the movie with a nomination. Today, McKay is tackling a what-if scenario, riffled with a perceived political posturing and doggedness throughout American society, that could be easily transferred to serious relevant issues like COVID-19, to climate change, and beyond.
Let me start somewhere the least bit controversial… I thought the costumes were entirely on-point, and worked really well to influence the satirical characterisations – all except Rob Morgan’s God-awful wig, that is; what were they thinking? I actually believed Leonardo Di Caprio as this sheltered scientist, who’s bounced around the social and political landscape of his discovery like a drunk in a riptide. And Jennifer Lawrence is surprisingly convincing as this alternative science graduate, who can’t assimilate with what’s in front of her, and it’s her hair that’s going a long way to make it work, I swear (which, you’d think she would recolour whilst trying to lay low working at the convenience store later on, but anyway). I particularly loved Cate Blanchett’s accent, so typical of the women in her sights, and it took me a little while to even pop that it was her, disappearing into the caricature like she did with Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator; she’s one of my favourite aspects of the movie. Don’t Look Up might be billed as a comedy, but yeah, it’s a comedy in the same way that open-heart surgery is a comedy, so warn your friends – there’s one scene where Mark Rylance’s media mogul hybrid, Peter Isherwell, tells Di Caprio’s Dr. Mindy what-for, so calculatingly downplayed and raw, that it’s more frightening than anything a Bond villain has said or done in years: even the good ones. Imagine being told that you’re doing to die alone, mathematically, according to the data. I thought there were only really two moments that struck me as genuinely funny – one, I think, is meant to be funny and the other one, maybe not; when Jason (Jonah Hill) wants to say a prayer for stuff, like cars and shirts, because if the world goes, then all the cool stuff will go too, and isn’t it sad? 😂 And the other one comes through the tiny Sarah Silverman cameo, where she thinks the President actually said that ‘if poor people don’t want to be poor, they should pick better lottery numbers’ – that’s a dark joke; horrific if actually said, hilarious if not, and I laughed out loud.
As for the overall story, there were times where I was just thinking, ‘…I don’t think things would go down like this’. Or maybe things would go down exactly like this, and already are! Ah, who knows? I don’t know. But I think the largest point of this movie is that our brains are cuckhold by the system, or should I say, ‘the system’, depending on where you sit. There are layers upon layers of satirical finger-waving in this movie, and liking each bit or not is all going to depend upon where your sensitivities lie. You could argue that the movie’s stance – Washington’s a farce, reality TV’s a farce, social media is a farce, modern journalism is a farce – is not really pushing the boundaries of conversation with revelations. But Don’t Look Up is also so strong in using a pressing dilemma of something very real to disallow us the wriggle room around the dangers of our social systems, potentially mired in corruption. It would be easy to say, ‘yeah, I don’t like this movie’, but I don’t think Don’t Look Up is a movie that’s made to be liked. It makes proud human ingenuity and accomplishment in other space adventures like The Martian look like a joke. But does that mean Don’t Look Up isn’t any good, then? From this guy’s perspective, Don’t Look Up is certainly made of quality, and executes what it means to do well. I think it satirises the left and right pretty evenly, even if it puts a foot down firmer on one side over the other; The Hunt tried to do something similar last year, and this is much more effective. My only true objection is that considering the movie satirises everything, it allows Ariana Grande’s Riley Bina to sing for an eternity – I kept waiting for the movie to cut her off, like it had any other industry clicking their tongues to make a point, and eventually it does, but I felt like it went on for too long, like by listening to her sing a pop song about the asteroid, we were genuinely doing ‘the thing’. Because surely the music industry is just as often full of hot air like anything else – maybe they had a deal with Grande to get her an Academy Award nomination for Best Song, but play the song in the credits. Don’t Look Up even uses Ron Perlman’s character to roast movies like Independence Day, Armageddon, and Space Cowboys; okay, mad respect for recognising a more dated and nuttier time in disaster cinema, but it just goes to show how America’s gumption and liberty could get anything done in cinema in the late 90s, and less than thirty years later, blowing up the planet due to bureaucratic fumble is the more believably digestible scenario; it’s really sad.
For me, Don’t Look Up is a deep swirl of chaos, and I already know that I’d appreciate it more on subsequent viewings, able to pick it apart knowing what was coming from where, if I can ever bring myself to go through it again – like, why did the General charge for snacks? It’s more infuriating that never finding out the reason behind Louie C.K.’s ice-fishing story in American Hustle. But obviously, this is one of those movies where the external reviews are going to mean diddly-squat, perhaps tainted in the very systems the movie is giving the stink-eye, so it’s up to you to watch this movie and figure out how you feel for yourself. Will you want to swallow it all or spit it out? Is the world proper-fucked, or is it just the way it’s always been, with counter-culture content perpetuating a narrative that everything is rotten, and the world is damned. More precisely, what do you believe of the world and what do you want from your movie? Don’t Look Up is not made to have a moral, or the answers; it’s just a nihilistic take on what’s happening to the world around us. All I can say with conviction is, to release this movie on Christmas, where there’s minimal deviation on the notion that Christmas is a time of merriment and togetherness, and to put our difference aside – harsh. Or maybe, watch this movie as a catalyst for conversation; duke it out with your family, and learn something.
4.0
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