Film Review: Don't Look Up
Images courtesy of Netflix.
I’ve been a fan of Adam McKay for a long time, and I would, without hesitation, put his early work, from Anchorman through to Anchorman 2, to be some of the greatest American comedy films of all time. He has this innate ability to capture the essence of wildest stupidity and mine it for all its worth, both for hilariously idiotic shenanigans and cunning sociopolitical satire.
So when McKay started making more seriously political films, I was surprised. I wasn’t a fan of The Big Short as I thought it was too up in its own exposition to be an engaging film, but I will be one of the few to say I loved Vice and its absurdist and chaotic retelling of real events.
Don’t Look Up is a weird balance of both. Simultaneously too into itself to really invest the audience, but ridiculous enough to never be boring. Like all of McKay’s films, it is smart in its stupidity, presenting the highest of higher-ups as bumbling buffoons who don’t know what they’re doing, treating the fate of the world as a popularity contest. It seems too over-the-top to be true, but when you look at the last 10 or even 20 years of American politics, it is almost scarily accurate.
The political satire is far too accurate to even be funny, but it is.
The story is of a group of scientists (lead by characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio & Jennifer Lawrence) who discover a large “planet-killer” comet is going to strike the earth in half a year, and the bureaucratic nightmare of trying to get the people in charge of the United States, and the world, to do something about it.
But what is the film really about? Well, obviously it’s about climate change and the lack of work the people in power are putting in to stop its devastating effects. But I will quickly list off several of the other subjects this film effortlessly (and not at all delicately) tackles: Milquetoast popular journalism that has to make everything in the news sound pleasant, celebrity obsession dominating the media, tech companies and their eccentric billionaire CEOs taking over industries they should be leaving to the experts, and how sci-fi aesthetics & sensibilities have precedence over functionality in those tech companies. McKay has never been one for subtlety, which is his biggest strength when used right, because it’s in his lack of subtlety he can hide the subtext.
Adam McKay is angry, and this movie is yelling at us.
The performances are some of the highlights of this film, most of which are as over-the-top as the subject matter, but still bring in brief moments of breath-catching nuance, especially by the two leads. I shouldn’t have to say Leonardo DiCaprio is great, he’s able to elevate the script and deliver moments of true gravitas, and show off his more comedic side. Jennifer Lawrence compliments with her passionate and tech-savvy millennial-POV-character. Jonah Hill & Meryl Streep bounce off each other perfectly as mother-and-son political duo. The whole ensemble is full of talented actors, almost too much star power, but is absolutely necessary for McKay’s message that even the cast billing is exaggerated.
Hank Corwin’s editing for the most part was playful and inventive. I like the parts where it intercuts between the mundane and the important, between important world-changing political speeches and boring waiting room chit-chat, between gigantic rocket launches and pleasant dinner conversation. McKay is absolutely a fan of just comedically cutting a scene short, it happens at the end of almost every scene, even in the middle of a conversation.
But I must say I hope the editor and his assistants were paid extra because the maddening slideshows McKay’s been playing with in his recent films are reaching ridiculous levels. There are huge sections in this movie that are just montages of stock footage. Sometimes it works almost like chapter breaks, other times it just seems like random footage with the intent of showing you “these are things on Planet Earth and they will die!”
Nicholas Britell creates one of his best scores yet, managing to blend an upbeat, jazzy sound with the intense, dramatic orchestral blares that portray the true urgent, apocalyptic weight of this situation.
Overall, I’d say I enjoyed it for the most part, I can appreciate that not everyone will like the bluntness of this film, but every now and then we need something like this to smack the audience with its message, even when doing so will cause that very audience to give it the cold shoulder, reacting just like the characters within the film do.
Don’t Look Up is showing in select cinemas and streaming on Netflix now.
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