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It takes a certain kind of touch, a populist brilliance, to know that “Milk was a bad choice” could help launch a comedy empire. Adam McKay had that when he scoured through the many improvised lines of “Anchorman,” and co-created what will probably be known as the last movement of American blockbuster comedy. And he continued that touch with the unmitigated triumph “ The Big Short ,” venturing to educate moviegoers about the housing crisis using movie stars and furious monologues. But McKay is mightily thwarted by the larger scope of “Don’t Look Up,” a hybrid of his comedic and dramatic instincts that only dreams of being insightful about social media, technology, global warming, celebrity, and in general, human existence. A disastrous movie, “Don’t Look Up” shows McKay as the most out of touch he’s ever been with what is clever, or how to get his audience to care.

If “Don’t Look Up” deserves any award, it’s for the work of its casting director, Francine Maisler . This Netflix movie is packed with so many big, expensive names, and it often puts them all in the same room. One scene has Leonardo DiCaprio , Ariana Grande , Cate Blanchett , Tyler Perry , and Jennifer Lawrence sitting next to each other, with Scott Mescudi ( Kid Cudi ) on a video feed for good measure. The amount of star power on-screen is set up for a once-in-a-lifetime comedy free-for-all, but “Don’t Look Up” uses this to make one of many anti-provocative jokes about how celebrity messiness compels us more than the death of our planet. Get used to that rise of anticipation and crash of execution if you want to be unsurprised by "Don't Look Up."

The movie's first bungled joke concerns its biggest name, Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a low-level astronomer from Michigan. McKay takes the nuclear energy within golden boy DiCaprio, the kind that gets him Oscar nominations year after year, and makes him swallow it so that he turns into a mildly amusing Will Ferrell character. The ulcers for DiCaprio’s Dr. Mindy are especially bad after his assistant Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) casually makes a horrific discovery: a comet is coming for planet Earth in six months and 14 days. They quickly want to let the world know, and realize in the coming days that people don’t care about bad news about the future.

Their initial audience for their news is the President of the United States, played by Meryl Streep . When she does finally take a meeting with them, she’s more concerned about her polling numbers, how things will look; an apocalypse won’t help the upcoming primaries. McKay begins to needle the viewer with the joke that no one cares about the end of the world as much the latest distracting scandal. There’s no respite offered from Jonah Hill , who plays a mildly funny character—her chief of staff, and sociopathic son—but is reduced to easy bro jokes. Like many characters, you can see the reflection of what it means, but the joke often ends at recognition. And because the movie’s editing is complicit in the short attention spans that McKay nonetheless rages against, it tends to intercut different framed pictures of Streep’s President Orlean with various celebrities, or hop from one scene to another while characters are talking mid-sentence.

Mindy and Dibiasky then take their message to the media, but the platform is a banter-heavy morning show (hosted by vacuous characters played by Perry and Blanchett) where the producers try to smooth their story into a cutesy scientific discovery in between the aforementioned Grande incident. Only one of the astronomers makes it out of the studio appearance without turning into a national meme—and no one takes their screed seriously—but it sets them on contrasting paths of popularity, becoming the media distraction themselves. Credit to moments when the chaos of "Don't Look Up" feels inspired, watching Leonardo DiCaprio use his Oscar-approved volume to scream “We’re all going to die” on a “Sesame Street”-like show is funny.

But of the many exciting names who are then wasted on this movie’s limited sense of humor, Blanchett is at the top of the list. She’s one of the best in the game, and McKay makes her plastic and cheap, and one of many characters who are not stretched out nearly enough in this high-art spoof. The same more or less happens to a forgotten Lawrence, or Streep, or Perry, or Melanie Lynskey , or Timoth é e Chalamet, as yet another grungy, lackadaisical, superficial pre-adult. And then there’s Rob Morgan , who plays a nothing sidekick to Lawrence and DiCaprio despite being just as good as them.

The plotting of “Don’t Look Up” isn't just anti-urgent, it also makes one constantly aware of what this movie is not doing. Aside from how it continuously makes you scrape the walls of its hollow comic sequences for a laugh, it does not say anything new about how misinformation became a political cause, or about how scandals are the true opiate for the masses, whether it involves a pop star or the president. It certainly has little to offer about the role technology plays in this, with Mark Rylance playing a half- Elon Musk , quarter-Joe Biden tech guru who calls the shots even more than POTUS. “Don’t Look Up” thinks it’s pushing many savvy political buttons, when it’s only pointing out the obvious and the easy, over and over.

McKay uses frustrating shorthand to create scope out of his scenario that concerns the whole world, but only when it cares to acknowledge it—the constant stock footage is so broad that it turns human existence into a generic nothingness (someone, lock him out of the stock!), and there’s little wit from its social media montages, which introduce a new hashtag after each public development, including the denier phrase that gives the movie its title. It’s an entertainer’s tired shtick dressed up as authorship—McKay has also made yet another talented cinematographer (in this case, Oscar winner Linus Sandgren ), bobble the camera for the sake of feigning energy (one shot in particular looks like the camera is dropped right before it cuts away).

It’s almost irrelevant that this is McKay’s worst film yet, because there’s something far more maddening about the promise of, the potential, and the importance that “Don’t Look Up” foists upon itself. This is, of course, about global warming, and how we’re not doing enough about it — a funny premise for a star-studded comedy with disturbing stake s. But McKay has filled this parable with hot air, wanting us to marvel at and then choke on its mediocre jokes.

Now playing in select theaters and available on Netflix on December 24.

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Don't Look Up (2021)

138 minutes

Jennifer Lawrence as Kate Dibiasky

Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr. Randall Mindy

Meryl Streep as President Janie Orlean

Cate Blanchett as Brie Evantee

Rob Morgan as Dr. Clayton 'Teddy' Oglethorpe

Jonah Hill as Jason Orlean

Mark Rylance

Tyler Perry as Jack Bremmer

Timothée Chalamet as Quentin

Ron Perlman as Colonel Ben Drask

Ariana Grande as Riley Bina

Kid Cudi as DJ Chello

Melanie Lynskey as June

Himesh Patel as Phillip

Writer (story by)

David Sirota

Cinematographer

Linus Sandgren
Hank Corwin
Nicholas Britell
Francine Maisler

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The Netflix movie Don’t Look Up , directed by Adam McKay, is about an astronomy professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his doctoral student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) who discover a comet of catastrophic proportions heading straight toward planet Earth. Their data is clear. The comet is big enough to destroy the entire world and is set for direct impact in six months and fourteen days.

The film mainly focuses on the frustrated efforts of Dr. Mindy and Dibiasky to alert the government and general public about the comet and to call for immediate action. Meryl Streep plays the incompetent and narcissistic American president, Janie Orlean, who only heeds their warnings when she and her administration think it will boost her polling numbers.

But then Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), the CEO of a giant technology corporation called BASH, convinces the president to abort the mission to divert the comet away from Earth and to instead consider mining it for precious minerals. Meanwhile, Dr. Mindy and Dibiasky, along with a colleague from NASA, Dr. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), desperately try get the truth out in an age of fake news, conspiracy theories, and political greed.

Dr. Mindy himself doesn’t escape being corrupted by the allures of fame, political attention, and extramarital sex. A nervous man, unused to the limelight, he gets caught in the snares of powerful people who want to use him for their own gain, while also struggling to keep in touch with his convictions as a scientist, husband, and human being.

The film is an incisive and provocative critique on the shallow entertainment culture that has come to dominate mainstream American culture. From talk shows to internet memes to government bureaucracy, the terrifying truth of humanity’s impending doom is repeatedly denied, watered down, and politicized, until hardly anyone knows who to trust or what to believe.

At the height of his struggles with the president, BASH, and his own conflicted self, Dr. Mindy finally reaches the boiling point on live television. Featured on an insipid and superficial talk show called “The Daily Rip,” Dr. Mindy tries to calmly address the contradictory theories about the comet: “The comet is a good thing.” “There is no comet.” The hosts of the show tell him to “keep things light” and that joking “helps the medicine go down,” to which Mindy furiously explodes, seemingly out of the blue:

I’m sorry, but not everything needs to sound so pleasant, or charming, or likeable all the time. Sometimes, we need to be able to say things to one another. We need to hear things!

Look, let’s establish, once again, that there is a huge comet headed towards earth. And the reason we know there’s a comet is because we saw it. What other proof do we need?

And if we can’t all agree on the bare minimum that a giant comet the size of Mt. Everest hurtling its way towards planet Earth is not a [expletive] good thing, then what the hell happened to us? I mean, how do we even talk to each other? What have we done to ourselves? How do we fix it? [I’m] not on one side or the other. I’m just telling you the truth.”

Mindy’s tirade feels prophetic and incredibly timely for our own cultural moment, when it does seem that, as Americans, we are failing to find ways to agree on fundamental values, facts, and truths about our existence. When we all live in different worlds, espousing different ideologies and conflicting theories devoid of reason, truth, or nuance, there’s no way to talk to each other, as Dr. Mindy laments so furiously.

In the end, the film gives a meditation on life’s preciousness, and how even in the face of catastrophe, gratitude is the proper posture to take. If we come together in humility, we can agree that life is a gift, and one that’s given undeservedly.

At the end of the film, Dr. Mindy, along with his closest friends and family, reflect on their memories together and the gifts they’re especially thankful for. They do this while sharing a big meal together. They even spend time in prayer, after which Dr. Mindy says softly, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?”

I found the film strangely beautiful, somber, and timely. I hope those who take the time to watch it will be reminded, as I was, of the goodness and wonder of life, and to be thankful and responsible for the time we’ve been given.

Peter Biles is the author of Hillbilly Hymn and Keep and Other Storie s . He graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois in 2019 and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. He has also written stories and essays for a variety of publications, including Plough, Dappled Things, The Gospel Coalition, Salvo, and Breaking Ground.

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Don’t Look Up (2021) – A Reflection

[SPOILERS AHEAD – I wouldn’t want to disappoint you before the movie itself does.]

“There’s a new movie on Netflix with Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio,” said my wife. That was enough for me. I enjoy the work of both actors. The Iron Lady, Mamma Mia, Titanic, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Said movie also starred Jennifer Lawrence and featured Timothee Chalamet. I like both of them as well, though neither name put a film on my “must-see” list. Said movie was directed by someone named Adam McKay. I did not know who that was. I do now. He’s a former writer for Saturday Night Live and the screenwriter for a whole passel of Will Ferrell movies.

About the actors I can only say, “I hope it was just a paycheck.” With a lot of Listerine, I can probably wash the taste of Don’t Look Up out of my mouth and continue to watch their films.

About Adam McKay, I’ll say, “Stick to low comedy. It suits you.”

Don’t Look Up is the story of astronomers who discover that a Near Earth Object will soon impact the planet and cause an Extinction Level Event. They have a very hard time getting people to believe them. Then, when people do believe them, three missions to save the Earth fail. Two because corporate greed, the third because, well… the plot.

Don’t Look Up wants to be a satire. But is it?

sat·ire the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. Oxford Languages

I get the impression that Director McKay thinks he’s made a Dr. Strangelove for the 21 st Century. The problem is that Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, is, well, a masterpiece. It is clever, memorable, and actually beloved by people who work in the nuclear industry it criticizes. Dr. Strangelove is successful satire.

Don’t Look Up is Saturday Night Live brought to the big screen (and to streaming). It’s a Will Ferrell movie that somehow has the temerity to preach a sermon.

Is it satire? Well, it uses humor, or tries to. It features irony, but not on purpose. I’ll get to that shortly. It most certainly exaggerates, particularly by using the assured destruction of the earth by a foreign body as a metaphor for the gradual change of the Earth’s climate over time. It definitely exposes and criticizes stupidity—to wit:

The “heroes” of the story are emotionally unstable (Lawrence’s character loses her temper and begins shrieking on national television early in the film, then seems to fall into a state of utter apathy and goes off to shag skater boys) and vain (DiCaprio’s “Astronomer I’d Like to F__k” leaves his wife and sons to sleep with a news anchor with an apparent IQ lower than the size of his male endowment, though we’re assured she’s really just a bored genius.) A pop-singer who becomes the virtue-signaling mouthpiece for “Just Trust the Science” is rude, stupid and pretty much feral—an odd choice for a messiah, unless you’re from Hollywood, I suppose. The aforementioned news anchor and her cohost don’t know what to do when encountered with actual news, so they just yuck it up.

On the humor front, little of this is even a little amusing. Meryl Streep (because she’s Meryl Streep) is funny as a gender-swapped President Donald Trump, and some of her comedy gifts spill over onto Jonah Hill as her son/Chief of Staff.

So… I guess it is satire. But it’s badly executed satire. It’s overall not funny, and its criticism of specific stupidity drowns in the fact that it basically makes everyone look stupid. Indeed, about an hour into the film, I was thinking, “I really hope this movie ends with the destruction of the planet, because these people are all too stupid to live.”

(It does. Well, one of its required-in-2021 four endings is the destruction of Earth.)

Like all satire, Don’t Look Up tries to shape opinion. But here’s my question: what kinds of opinions does bad satire shape? Good satire is produced by people like Voltaire, like Oscar Wilde, like Stanley Kubrick. Good satire makes us laugh at ourselves as well as others. Good satire shapes opinions that are informed and sophisticated, because good satire is written by informed, sophisticated people.

Adam McKay, like most of his SNL cohorts, has strong, political sentiments, and he leverages them in his work to make his audience laugh at his political enemies and to ridicule anyone who disagrees with him. And herein lies a concern I’ve held for decades: too many of us get our news and allow our opinions to be shaped by the lowball comedy of people like Adam McKay. If ever the idea of “us vs. them” was prominently on display in America, it is on display in his work.

Coincidentally, only days before I saw this movie, I watched George Pal’s When Worlds Collide. I am currently re-reading Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer’s novel of the same name, as well as its sequel. I mention this because the plot of Don’t Look Up is largely torn from When Worlds Collide. The stories are so similar that the estates of the authors could (and should) take McKay and collabortator David Sirota to arbitration and have their names put in the film credits.

When Worlds Collide (1951) was an early SF disaster film, produced by special effects powerhouse George Pal, in which astronomers sight not one but two Near Earth Objects, and in which the Earth is subsequently destroyed. In both films, a survival ship is sent away from Earth before the end. In both films, the survival ship is financed by an unprincipled industrialist. In both films, violence ensues as the end comes. Both films end with the Earth being decimated and the survival ship arriving safely on a new world.

The differences: When Worlds Collide is not a satire. It also does not contain the plot thread of people disbelieving the astronomers. It would not matter if it did, because the effort to save humanity as a species is not dependent upon the triplet Gods of the 21 st Century—the President, the news media and dim-witted celebrities. Scientists in 1951 were apparently capable of existing without cronyism or fame, or at least the writers and directors thought so.

Don’t Look Up makes it clear that its authors disapprove of any effort to save the race using a survival ship. I’m guessing that, if it’s not possible to save the entire race, they consider it un-democratic to save some. (Perhaps Titanic shouldbe re-edited to show all hands going down with the ship? That’s just fair.)

At the end of When Worlds Collide , the head scientist sacrifices his own life and that of the industrialist to give the last of humanity a better chance to achieve escape velocity. In Don’t Look Up, the industrialist happily watches the President get eaten by a carnivorous ostrich, and becomes de facto leader of humankind.

When Worlds Collide also correctly assumes the complete destruction of Earth’s surface. Don’t Look Up actually shows trash floating in space to remind us that commercialism is bad. And then it has Jonah Hill surviving because he was in an underground bunker. I know, it’s comedy, but that still defies belief.

But where, indeed, is the irony? I promised it to you, didn’t I? Here you go:

The two films have one other key difference: In When Worlds Collide, the effort to save humanity is an international one. Although, because it was the Fifties, black and brown faces are not shown, the action begins in South Africa and scientists join the team from the world over. In the novels, in fact, it’s made clear that people in other nations are mounting their own space missions to save more people. The story we see is just focused on one of those missions.

Don’t Look Up takes a surprising (considering the Social Democrat politics of its creative team) “America First” attitude. NASA mounts a mission to destroy the incoming threat while the rest of the world twiddles its thumbs. Then the industrialist orders the President to scrub the mission at the last minute so he can harvest the meteor for minerals to make cell phones. Then the industrialist’s attempt to save Earth while maximizing profits fails. Only then, in the eleventh hour, does another nation try to save the earth. They fail spectacularly. Why? We’re not told. We’re left to assume that it’s because the rest of the world can’t do anything right if the United States doesn’t have a competent President.

Adam McKay, if his Twitter feed is to be believed, is very proud of his film. He has declared preemptively that any criticism of his film just proves he was right all along. He seems to genuinely expect his two-hour-plus screed to make people “wake up” and realize that, “Oh! Climate Change really is happening!” Adam McKay seems to believe—and it’s a time-honored belief in the entertainment industry—that most people are too dumb to even understand what scientists are saying, so they need to send in the clowns to explain things.

Adam McKay made this film to try and end the problem of Climate Denial.

But here’s the definition of Climate Denier:

cli·mate de·ni·er a person who rejects the proposition that climate change caused by human activity is occurring. Oxford Languages

What McKay and others who rail about Climate Deniers don’t realize is that their argument is not with people who don’t believe scientists, or who reject data that’s placed in front of them.

Those people are not McKay’s problem. His problem is with people like me, who absolutely accept the data that show a warming trend, a trend of change, and absolutely accept that humankind’s activities influence that trend. We just happen to reject the hysteria of people like McKay, and we reject their proposed solutions, because their solutions tend to be far more political and economic than scientific. And I think McKay knows that. So when he talks about “Climate Deniers,” I think he means something more like:

cli·mate de·ni·er a person who rejects my proposed solutions to “fix” climate change. ripped from the depths of steve’s bad attitude

After all, it’s better optics to pretend that people only disagree with you, not because your arguments may be flawed, but because they don’t trust science.

“Trust Science?” I don’t. Nobody should. Science doesn’t ask to be trusted. I accept science as a rational method of investigating the world around us and how it works. I accept (but usually question) peer-reviewed studies based on solid methodology and data collection. I adapt when new data becomes available. “Trust” has no place in that process.

What this particular instance of “Trust the science” is really asking us to trust are the flawed economic theories and anti-capitalist rhetoric of people like McKay. And to them I say, if you really care about science and the environment, then lay down your politics and let’s talk about solutions that aren’t hopelessly mired in your political philosophy of democratic socialism.

One thought on “ Don’t Look Up (2021) – A Reflection ”

Couldn’t have described this trash film any better.

Why Are People So Mad About Don’t Look Up ?

Climate change is a tough subject for any film, let alone a satire.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in "Don't Look Up"

Adam McKay’s disaster satire Don’t Look Up is many things at once: a parable of our distracted society, a primal scream of a warning, and a broad comedy from the writer/director of Anchorman . Such a delicate balance has made the star-studded Netflix film a polarizing movie.

Critics, audiences, and activists have both savaged and praised the movie, and the backlash has highlighted the difficulty of conveying an urgent message with comedy. Has political satire lost its power? Or has reality become so absurd that it’s now beyond parody?

That challenge was evident in the making of Don’t Look Up . As McKay told David Sims , he wrote the story about a planet-killing comet (and our society’s inability to act collectively to stop it) as a climate-change metaphor. But after the script was done, production shut down for the pandemic and he watched the follies of a real-life disaster surpass his fictional one.

COVID-19, climate change, and a planet-killing comet are very different crises. But the narrow-minded leaders of Don’t Look Up are unable to act against even the most obvious of existential threats. How close is its story to our own? And can its message make a difference?

Staff writers Sophie Gilbert, David Sims, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss the movie and the current state of satire on the Atlantic culture podcast The Review . Listen here:

Subscribe to The Review : Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. It contains spoilers for Don’t Look Up .

Sophie Gilbert: Today we are here to talk about Don’t Look Up, the disaster satire from Adam McKay that came out on Netflix last month. Here’s a bit of plot by way of recap, if you haven’t seen it or just want a refresher. The premise is dramatic but straightforward: Two astronomers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, discover a comet will hit Earth in six months. They attempt to warn people. They appeal to the White House. They go to the media. Lastly, they appeal to the business leaders hoping to profit from the big ball of minerals headed our way. But people aren’t eager to hear the message, and the planet-killing comet becomes another culture-war football as it nears Earth. DiCaprio and Lawrence’s characters implore people on social media to just look up, while Meryl Streep’s President Janey Orlean tells her followers: Don’t Look Up .

It’s not the subtlest of metaphors. But then again, it’s not supposed to be. The movie’s director, Adam McKay, said he was inspired to write the movie by his burgeoning terror about the climate crisis. And then the pandemic happened, and a comedy about even the most obvious of threats failing to stir collective action became suddenly newly relevant. So today we’re here to break down the movie, but also talk about the state of satire—and the question of whether our culture has become too depressing, too absurd, too lamentable to satirize.

So let’s talk about the movie. The release has almost become a parody of discourse itself. There have been reviews, counter-reviews, and defenses. A lot of debate about this movie. So David—how did you react when you first saw it?

David Sims: I saw this film fairly early, a few months before it came out, because I interviewed Adam McKay . But I remember emerging in a real bummer mood. The movie really kind of rattled me. It’s not how you’d exit after seeing a new comedy from McKay.

Spencer Kornhaber: Were you in a glass case of emotion?

Sims: ( Laughs. ) Yeah, I was. Milk was a bad choice. The film obviously ends on a down note in many ways, but I kept having this experience watching it where some twist would play out, and I would have the knee-jerk reaction of: This is a bit much, even in a satire. And then another side of my brain would nudge me with some real-world example of it. So I had a complicated reaction to it. And I was sort of amazed by the way the discourse played out on its release, with this initial wave of mixed reviews and then a kind of anti-critical backlash. Why are you criticizing a movie that’s trying to send a message? And the whole online discourse became kind of exhausting, which is partly what the movie’s about.

Gilbert: It’s true. I thought your interview with Adam McKay was really interesting, when he said that the first two-thirds of the film was supposed to be entertaining and the final third was supposed to hammer home the message. My experience of it was really the opposite. The first third was just panic, with everyone making bad decisions. And then by the final third [it] had kind of a nihilistic acceptance and a nice, sentimental dinner party.

Sims: I would agree with that completely, yeah.

Gilbert: Spencer, did you take in the takes and counter-takes about the movie?

Kornhaber: Yeah, I knew Don’t Look Up was in a discourse cyclone with film critics hating this movie and liberal commentators blasting film critics. That’s a flip of the dynamic that we’ve seen play out with blockbuster movies—but not about climate change, which is the subtext of this movie. I was ready for it to be like an interesting bad movie, but I think it’s kind of an extraordinary movie. It’s accomplishing something that I’ve never quite seen done before. And while it made me laugh, it actually made me cry, which shocked me, and it gave me things to think about. And what else do you want from movies?

Gilbert: I didn’t cry, but I left persuaded more than ever that there is never going to be anything that manages to sway the public to save the world in any meaningful sense. We’re just too concerned with our own lives. It really makes the case that we have evolved past the point of collective action. Everyone’s kind of assessing Don’t Look Up on different grounds: There are the people assessing it as a film. And then there are the people who are like, “How dare you assess this as a work of film?! It’s a primal scream about our inaction in the face of a threat that is dooming us all!”

Read: Don’t Look Up is an apocalyptic comedy for our moment

Kornhaber: It’s supposed to be a movie that saves the world, according to the discourse. And I don’t think that’s an expectation to have for any work of fiction. But to be fair, I think the way that McKay has talked about this movie kind of makes it seem like maybe he did want to save the world with this movie? Did you get that sense talking to David?

Sims: I get the sense that Adam McKay thinks that things are very dire, and the climate emergency is going to accelerate even faster than predicted. And so certainly he’s on the battlements, trying to sound an alarm. But he’s an entertainer. That is his stock-in-trade. He’s not making An Inconvenient Truth ; he’s not just standing in front of a PowerPoint.

Kornhaber: But that kind of is what The Big Short was.

Sims: Well, look, his last out-and-out comedy—his last movie with Will Ferrell , The Other Guys —ended with these credits that rolled like, yeah, a sort of PowerPoint series of graphs about the financial crisis. And pension-fund machinations were a background story in that movie. But I remember people walking out of the movie being like: “That was funny. What was with the end there?” And, since then, McKay has shifted to a more polemical style of filmmaking that is grappling with real-world stuff.

He made The Big Short . He made Vice . He produced Succession and directed its pilot. When I interviewed Bong Joon Ho a few years ago, Bong said McKay is one of his favorite American filmmakers. And Bong also makes these straight-at-the-camera current-event satires. And the question is: How do you balance that with entertainment? How do you get your big message across while also keeping the audience hooked? And McKay’s got movie stars. He’s got twists and turns. He’s got special effects. Throw all that together in a blender.

Gilbert: But it’s also a question of: How do you balance advocacy and satire? Because satire exposes, and advocacy provokes. And this film works as a very brutal satire in the sense that it certainly made me feel that the world is too fucked to save itself. And everything—including all the forces of business in Silicon Valley, in media and entertainment—just distract people from the fundamental crisis at the heart of the movie. But I think the movie kind of dooms itself in that it’s asking you to pay attention, but it’s also telling you that it won’t matter.

Sims: Right. You’re also asking: How do you also balance advocacy and nihilism? Because there is a certain level of nihilism that comes with talking about the climate crisis that is hard to avoid. And obviously, I think McKay knows that. He’s making an asteroid movie . These movies usually end with some sort of triumph. And he knows it would be ridiculous for him to end the movie on a high note, because that would undercut his message. And so he has to end it on the bummer note, but that’s a tough thing to ask of a star-studded mainstream comedy premiering on Netflix at Christmastime.

Gilbert: It’s such a tricky tone to nail. Do you think there’s a version of the movie with a slightly different balance that could have worked better?

Sims: You could make a more straight-ahead blockbuster movie that’s just tinged with metaphor. But the thing that this flirts with being—but does not completely commit to being—is more like a Dr. Strangelove kind of movie. A pure anarchic satire that is set in the real world, but every character is cartoonish, and there’s no sense of humanity whatsoever. But Don’t Look Up tries to retain this core of humanity, especially in the Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence characters. When I interviewed McKay, he said DiCaprio was obviously interested in the project and the message but was not going to commit until they’d figured out his character. He clearly did not want to be in a cartoony pastiche movie.

McKay also told me that his editor had said it was the trickiest movie he’d ever edited with McKay. The tone is so difficult to nail down, because it’s swerving from bleakness to silliness to realism. It’s a staggering challenge to try and contain everything, and in such a big ensemble with so many twists and turns. So that’s where things about it didn’t click for me. But the last act worked really well for me, as it starts to abandon the more cartoony stuff and the media critiques. It becomes more of a character movie set in the last days of Planet Earth.

I love Adam McKay. I’m a very fierce defender of his comedy stuff. I don’t know where he goes from here. He’s making a movie about Elizabeth Holmes next. He’s staying in the real-world critique. And this definitely is a very grand, ambitious work that you have to admire the ambition, I think, even if you don’t admire the end product.

Gilbert: Yeah. I wanted to talk about the arc of his career, but because he talked about wanting to move on from oafish white guys like the products of his earliest films because they stopped being funny. And I don’t know that they stopped being funny, necessarily. I think they’re in many ways as funny as they’ve ever been, but I think the humor made them too lovable.

Sims: Absolutely.

Gilbert: The dunces of Anchorman and Talladega Nights —you really find charm in something that turns out was not so charming.

Kornhaber: Yeah; that felt like a Bush-era approach. And now in the Trump era, we’ve seen just how awful these characters are, and they shouldn’t be made lovable.

Sims: I do connect to Leo’s character. Not as someone I’m like; I just found the arc of him being celebrity-ified compelling. He’s this introverted scientist just trying to get a message across—who then becomes [part of a] Fauci-esque matter of debate in the middle of the movie, where people either think he’s dreamy or he’s a liar. It gets at the weird way that our culture can only process people as celebrities now, even when they are not striving particularly to be. I found that to be one of the most effective bits of commentary in this movie. And I think a lot of what works about this movie works because of DeCaprio. He’s giving an extremely committed performance, and this movie would not have a center without him. Otherwise, I found some of the media stuff a little broad. There’s no morning show like the one in this with such an absolute cultural-lodestone quality.

Kornhaber: Yeah, to me, the media stuff felt the most dated and predictable. I think the dissonance with the media stuff also speaks to the way the comet doesn’t work as a metaphor for climate change. The media loves negativity, loves the apocalypse. If there’s a big asteroid heading toward Earth, there’s no way that’s not front-page news immediately. And it’d be totally histrionic and unhelpful, probably.

It’s just not the way that climate change works. It’s not something that’s going to affect us in a world-destroying way in the next six months, though the movement has admirably tried to create deadlines and tip-over points. It’s just not the same thing as an asteroid, and so it doesn’t ring true that this news would be ignored. It’s a little bit more like COVID to me. What did McKay say about the COVID with regard to the movie?

Sims: That’s what interested me most in talking with him. He wrote this movie as one specific metaphor. And then as he’s getting ready to make it, he has to shut down because of another apocalyptic moment in culture—that then ends up kind of proving so much of his critique unintentionally. That is what’s wild about this film. And he agreed that it was a crazy circumstance. As he was in lockdown, he went back to the script and had to intensify some of the satire—make the wackiness quotient of Don’t Look Up even higher, to eclipse moments like Trump floating injecting bleach on national TV. It’s too ludicrous, and yet it’s played out. So he needs to match the absurdity. It does reflect what’s difficult about satire right now. How do you find ludicrousness in our ludicrous reality? How do you heighten and amuse when everything already feels so heightened all the time?

Gilbert: Right; there was the idea that Trump defied satire, because he was bigger than it could ever manage to be in its wildest imagination. I also think it’s really hard to satirize things when you’re in the middle of them. And the climate crisis is a tricky one for that, because we’re going to be in the middle of it now until we all die. So there’s no relaxed off-phase to digest this in the sense that maybe there will be with the Trump presidency in a decade or so. It just seems tricky in this moment for entertainment to tackle these really big issues.

Sims: A similar problem for Hollywood was the difficulty of the Iraq War movie. That was much-discussed in the 2000s: We’re in Iraq. It’s a major thing that’s happening to America. Why can’t we make movies about it that resonate? There were so many movies about the Iraq War or modern warfare in general that flopped. And eventually we had The Hurt Locker . Even though it wasn’t a huge hit, it won an Oscar and was a big, memorable movie. But the struggle with depicting the Iraq War in art is the same as the struggle with climate change. It’s very difficult to turn into something entertaining, because almost every Iraq War movie was just about: We’re stuck. We don’t know what we’re doing. The enemy is oblique. The purpose is vague. We thought it was just impossible to put a heroic narrative onto it.

And obviously, that’s something Vietnam War movies had trouble with, too. But then the Vietnam movie became more of a thing post-Vietnam, after we were out of the war and there was more reflection. It’s just going to be hard to do with climate change. You can’t make a simple movie about scientists saving the world. It’s not going to reflect reality.

Kornhaber: I think this quest for movies to deliver a message that changes people’s minds is maybe quixotic. There aren’t a ton of works in history like that. But what they do do is give you a set of like images and characters and metaphors and clichés that, when they work, become absorbed into our language. They help us talk about the world in ways that are hopefully progressing our discourse and society.

Sims: Right, I think of Jordan Peele as one of the more interesting, metaphorical directors. Both Get Out and Us delivered very strong, punchy metaphors. Get Out had the sunken place that you could read a lot of contemporary observation into how Black people are marginalized or forced to sublimate parts of themselves. And then Us — which I think is wildly underrated as one of the best pieces of satire Hollywood’s made in recent years—about how capitalist society works, where there’s so much that you just have to ignore.

Kornhaber: Absolutely; Us is a wonderful distillation of how the world works, and definitely underrated. But with Get Out , I think it made a lot of white people check themselves about whether they were a character in that movie. And with Don’t Look Up , one of the things that works about it is: True, you can’t really satirize Trump. He’s kind of beyond parody. But you can call attention to the dynamics of the way that people relate to him and the effect he has on the world around him—and on the viewers themselves.

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Under the Paving Stones

A blog about culture and politics

The power of Don’t Look Up is in the details

I went into Don’t Look Up , the new political satire on Netflix directed by Adam McKay ( The Big Short , Vice ), expecting it to be heavy-handed. That was the verdict of many film critics and others I follow: that its dystopian spoof of climate politics is well-meaning but as subtle as sledgehammer. I was hoping to find it at least somewhat worthwhile despite this heavy-handedness.

I was delighted to discover that it’s far better than I was expecting. I thought it was brilliant. Yes it’s populist and polemical — and as probably the only mainstream feature film ever made about the climate emergency, so it should be. But it has far more subtlety and nuance than the discussion had indicated. It paints with both broad and fine strokes, and that’s an excellent combination. I think a lot of its critics are either missing the point, or not seeing how a film like this can reach a lot of people with its gonzo style and humor and, yes, its loudly telegraphed message, while still containing nuance and being politically spot-on.

Don’t Look Up is a black comedy in the shape of a sci-fi disaster movie, and it’s both funny and terrifying. It’s got a rapid-fire pace, a crackling screenplay, a big cast and great characters. A lot goes on in it, and the considerable suspense as the story hurtles towards doom is part of the pleasure. But it’s necessary to discuss the plot in detail in order to discuss its politics, so just a warning that spoilers lie ahead.

Don’t Look Up is the story of two astronomers, student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a new comet and then, to their horror, calculate that it is on a trajectory to smash into the Earth in six months and cause an extinction-level event. The comet is clearly and blatantly a metaphor for climate change.

Dibiasky and Mindy alert the authorities to the impending catastrophe, but instead of decisive action and international cooperation to do something about the comet, as they were reasonably expecting, what ensues is a farce. Both the U.S. government and the media refuse to engage the comet seriously, and denialism is rampant among the public. The Trump-like U.S. president, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), sees the comet only as a political problem. First she decides to “sit tight and assess,” then launches a highly politicized mission to destroy it, then aborts that mission to back a tech billionaire, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), and his dangerous plan to engineer a partial impact so that the comet can be mined for rare minerals worth trillions. In order to quell public fears about the recklessness of this disaster capitalism, Orlean promotes a denialist slogan — the film’s title — while Dibiasky and Mindy scramble to tell the world the truth about the comet before it’s too late.

Don’t Look Up belongs to a great tradition of rabble-rousing socially and politically minded films. Some of its most obvious influences are the paranoid social dramas of the 1970s, especially Network , which it explicitly references in not one but two brilliant scenes depicting unhinged truth-telling rants on live TV. It also owes a lot to Oliver Stone’s best work in the 80s and early 90s — as much as I’m over Stone I have to admit this. The ensemble cast, the lively editing and use of multimedia, and, yes, the lack of subtlety in the populist messaging are all reminiscent of JFK and other classics by Stone, though it’s a stark contrast to his hippie boomer optimism.

The vicious satire of the machinations of the White House is clearly influenced by Veep and In the Loop . This is worth mentioning because Armando Iannucci’s creations are famed for their depth and incision. Despite its puzzling dismissal by many critics, Don’t Look Up truly does rise to that standard.

But it’s also great purely on a cinematic level. As an existential black comedy it has a bit of the spirit of David O. Russell’s millennial-era farces like Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees , and, in its more surreal moments, even the work of Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry. It’s a surprisingly beautiful film. For a film mostly made up of people talking in rooms, it’s nicely shot, with great visual design and a gorgeous color palette. The special effects are striking, and I especially love the archive footage of animals in its Malickian interstitial transition scenes, showing us all the color and beauty of life on Earth that is about to be forever lost.

I also love that Don’t Look Up is basically a dark reboot of Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact , one of my favorite mainstream films of the 90s. Deep Impact is noteworthy in the pantheon of disaster flicks for its focus on the human detail in all the impending doom — often credited to the fact that it was directed by a woman. Despite its bleakness, Don’t Look Up contains that same lovely humanism at its core — increasingly so as it approaches its apocalyptic conclusion — and that makes all the difference. It’s deeply cynical about the political system, but not about people.

Why should Don’t Look Up be subtle anyway? Given the stakes — you know, our civilization, life on earth — maybe we need sledgehammers? I was moved by this commentary about the film in Left Voice by theater artist and teacher Ezra Brain, entitled “Against Subtlety” :

The problems facing us aren’t subtle. Capitalist exploitation and environmental crises aren’t subtle. So why should our art be? Perhaps selfishly, perhaps as a reaction to the times we’re living in, I yearn for the death of subtlety in art. I yearn for art — but specifically political art — that will just show up and start talking about the problems. And, like it or not, Don’t Look Up does that: it shows up and starts talking about the problems.

Mind you I love subtlety in film. I love Sofia Coppola, Jafar Panahi, and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia . I don’t yearn for its death as such. But to the degree Don’t Look Up can be accused of lacking subtlety on a political level I thoroughly agree. As Dr. Mindy says in the film, “Not everything needs to sound so goddamn clever or charming or likeable all the time. Sometimes we need to just be able to say things to one another. We need to hear things.”

But again, I’m also arguing from the other direction: that it isn’t lacking subtlety. Like I said, it’s a very good film, and worthy of its influences; and its politics are actually quite sophisticated. I don’t agree with Nathan J. Robinson , in his otherwise excellent essay for A Current Affair rebutting the film’s critics, when he says that the quality of the film is “somewhat beside the point.” I don’t think it would work as well as agitprop if it wasn’t also a good film. And please remember, a film can hit you in the head with a message and still be complex and cinematically great; consider Do the Right Thing , or, to go all the way back, Battleship Potemkin .

Anyway, maybe it’s not the supposed lack of subtlety that bothers Don’t Look Up ‘s critics; maybe it’s simply that they don’t like the message. Robinson makes a great point when he says that some critics’ dismissals of the film as shrill and smug and obvious and too emotional and crude demagogy echo the dismissal of Kate Dibiasky in the film itself — and, of course, the dismissal of real-life climate activists.

Despite the critics, Don’t Look Up has been a massive success for Netflix , ranking as the third most popular film ever shown on the platform, and breaking a record for streaming hours in one week. I think this popularity says a lot about the appeal of the film’s message, and specifically its withering criticism of establishment politics in our age of crisis and disaster.

Due to its significance as the only movie of its kind (which in itself says a lot about the state of climate politics if you think about it), Don’t Look Up has inspired lots of hot takes and discourse on the left. One of the main leftist criticisms of it is that it supposedly portrays the masses as stupid and easily manipulated by politicians and corporations, instead of actors in their own destiny. This is a fair thing to discuss about the film, because indeed, besides the whistleblowing academics who are the protagonists, most of the characters are politicians, bureaucrats, media elites and corporate executives. When we see the masses at all, it’s in brief shots of ordinary people around the world watching news about the comet on TV.

I agree that the masses are where politics is at; they are the real agents of change and progress, and they are not stupid. However I don’t agree that the makers of Don’t Look Up are saying that people are stupid. The whole point of the film is to show us where bad ideas come from. I think it’s totally fair to portray the toxic effect that ruling-class media hegemony and the manufacture of consent have on public discourse. Examples of this are all over the place, but sticking with the theme of climate change, you only have to look to the years of campaigning by the fossil fuel industry and their powerful allies like the Koch brothers to trace the rise of climate denialism. Bad ideas like denialism (and anti-immigrant sentiment, and extreme nationalism, and so on) really do come from the top down; though of course the question of whether people take up or resist those ideas is very complex and ebbs and flows over time.

Another leftist criticism is that Don’t Look Up doesn’t show a radical response to the system’s lies and greed. The situation is hopeless from beginning to end and doesn’t offer the possibility of a mass uprising to take control from the predatory, nihilistic elites who are risking everything for their own profits. There are only a few quick shots of riots as the comet approaches and hope dwindles.

I think this is fine. It doesn’t need to have all the solutions. It’s not a film meant to show action, it’s a film meant to inspire action. It’s intended to drill holes in our faith in the system and show us that no one is coming to save us but us . As with Doctor Strangelove , another obvious influence, its deep cynicism and gallows humor is a political statement in and of itself (as well as being thrilling and funny as hell). It’s showing us what will happen if we don’t start opposing our leaders and their half-assed emissions targets, and collectively do something about the climate ourselves — and very soon.

Don’t Look Up was co-written by McKay and David Sirota. Sirota is a well-known leftist journalist; among other things he’s an editor for Jacobin , a socialist journal that I write for . He was also a campaign advisor and speechwriter for Bernie Sanders. Now, I’m a revolutionary socialist myself, I don’t support social democrats like Bernie, and no doubt Sirota and I would differ very sharply on the topic of how to bring about socialism. But he’s done some truly brilliant work here. It’s so great that an honest-to-God leftist was brought on board to co-write a high-profile film for such a big platform in this age of safe, formulaic filmmaking. His serious anticapitalist politics are marvellously palpable onscreen.

To name a brief but memorable moment in the film, Chris Evans has a laugh-out-loud funny, self-owning cameo as an action movie star who says that people shouldn’t look either up or down. “As a country, we need to stop arguing and virtue-signaling and just get along.” Blink and you might miss it, but it’s such an accurate takedown of the insipid, useless centrism that dominates liberal discourse, and I’d bet money that was Sirota’s idea.

But Sirota’s anticapitalism is crucial to the story in bigger ways too. It’s key to understanding the film’s commentary on the real-life climate emergency that the “Don’t Look Up” slogan is not simply a right-wing denial of science for its own sake, nor is it the result of ignorance or lack of education. It’s invented and promoted by the capitalist class in order to distract the public from their plan to exploit the comet for profit. There is a material reason for the denialism — just like there is in real life.

There’s no overstating how important this is. Don’t Look Up doesn’t place the blame for the climate crisis on the moral failings of ordinary people like you and me — it’s not our fault because we’re “stupid humans,” or because of our carbon footprints or plastic drinking straws. It’s the fault of a few very wealthy people who have names and addresses and outsized influence on our society. It’s a social and a structural analysis, not an individualist one. Given our society’s hyper-focus on individualism — which extends to narratives in cinema — it’s no wonder mainstream critics are spun out by it. It gives me hope that it might get through to a few viewers — especially young viewers — and get them to rethink the individualist narratives they’re being fed.

The fact that the film’s satire of Donald Trump is a woman is another excellent bit of incision. If the character was a man, if it was a mere caricature, it wouldn’t be much better than an SNL skit. As it is it’s a subtle deflation of gender essentialism in politics — of course a Republican woman president would be terrible; there’s more than a hint of Sarah Palin here.

But in fact the screenplay doesn’t name parties and, like Veep , it’s as much a critique of the evils of bourgeois liberalism and bipartisan consensus as it is of Trumpism — note the photo of Orlean hugging Bill Clinton that appears in one shot. The truth is there’s also some Joe Biden in the character’s DNA, and some viewers may miss that or may not want to see it.

Streep is so good as Orlean: she captures the perfect balance of crafty charisma and entitled obliviousness; while Jonah Hill plays off her in typically deranged fashion as her toxic son and White House Chief of Staff, the embodiment of her corrupt scheming. Whether Orlean is suppressing the truth about the comet or cheerleading the campaign to stop it — and she flip-flops on this several times — is all down to how it serves her political advantage in the moment. As Dibiasky tells some conspiracy theorists in one scene, “You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.” It’s a hilarious, but also far more realistic, answer to Deep Impact ‘s vision of a noble president who actually cares about the people.

I can’t say enough about Lawrence’s performance as Dibiasky, who discovers the comet and is therefore the one Earth’s doom is named for. Despite the fact that DiCaprio was paid more than Lawrence for working on the film, in many ways Dibiasky is the main character — the moral heart of the film, and the audience surrogate. As a twenty-something student who is vilified for the truth she reveals to the world, she’s a powerful symbol of the alienation and anger — and the activism — of younger generations. Everything about her — her nerdiness, her cool, vaguely goth style (she wears a bomber jacket to a meeting at the White House), her anxiety and self-medicating, her excellent taste in music — frames her as someone young viewers can relate to.

Seriously, it’s so great that the first moments of the film show her getting high and listening to “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit” in her headphones at her workstation, rapping along with it as she unexpectedly discovers the comet. This is both entirely plausible — of course a grad student might be smoking weed and listening to Wu while she works — and a deceptively simple but smart screenwriting trick to make anyone under a certain age who loves hip hop (in other words, a lot of us), instantly identify with her. It’s also a bit of an epigraph hinting at the rebellious, don’t-give-a-fuck attitude that will come to define her.

Lawrence brings so much simmering anger and palpable anxiety to the role. I love that she almost never smiles; her RBF is the visual signifier of the protagonists’ struggle for truth and a rational approach to crisis, and their mounting frustration and desperation. McKay says he cast Lawrence for her ability to communicate anger, and that was a good call. Ten years after her performance as Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games films (which I love), it’s cool that Lawrence once again stars as a young rebel in an anticapitalist popular film. There are even some parallels in the scenes involving Katniss’s and Dibiasky’s appearances on lurid, inane TV shows.

It’s spine-tingling when, unable to contain her fear and rage, Dibiasky blurts out the blunt truth on a live morning talk show as the dithering hosts (played to a perfect pitch by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry) obliviously attempt to spin the comet as infotainment. “You should stay up all night, every night crying, when we’re all 100% for sure going to fucking die!” she yells at the shocked hosts before fleeing the set.

It’s important to point out that this is not fatalism or nihilism on her part. By saying we’re all going to die, she’s not giving up. It’s realism with a purpose. She is bringing clarity to the situation in order to inspire action — or force it. To paraphrase the Russian revolutionary novelist Victor Serge, “She who does not cry out the truth when she knows the truth becomes the accomplice of the liars and falsifiers.”

The abuse and rejection of Dibiasky resonates on many levels. After her televised rant, she’s publicly shamed, gaslit, persecuted by the government, marginalized by her friends and family and made into a viral meme about shrill, angry women. She never really gives in, though she’s harassed by federal agents into silence, and develops a protective shell of cynicism and forced apathy. Later she’s reduced to working in a liquor store — another deft bit of screenwriting, marking her as a member of the precarious young working class — watching TV news helplessly as the government fiddles and schemes and Comet Dibiasky approaches. When it finally looms close enough to be seen with the naked eye, she comes out of her doldrums to lead the “Just Look Up” campaign — a desperate last-minute push to mobilize the world against the U.S. government and in support of a real answer to the emergency.

Dibiasky’s character arc is heroic but also heartbreaking, and, despite the fanciful elements of the story, oh so relatable for those of us on the left — or any woman who’s ever tried to speak out about anything.

By the way, Dibiasky’s rant has already become iconic; the meme-ing of it within the film has spilled over into real life. For example there’s already a t-shirt , mirroring the skateboard sticker seen in the film that signals her popularity among disaffected youth after her rejection by the establishment. We’ll see if the character becomes an enduring symbol of resistance in popular culture in the way that Katniss Everdeen has, but she already is one to me.

I don’t mean to downplay DiCaprio’s performance; he’s terrific too, playing against type as the anxiety-ridden, dysfunctional midwestern academic who’s hopelessly out of depth as an activist on the international stage. His panic attacks are very relatable for me, to the point that I felt a bit shaky watching them. He has his own wonderful moments of anger and speaking truth to power. But unlike his student, he wavers in his opposition to the president’s disaster-capitalist solution, wasting crucial time lending his credibility to the plan instead of publicly criticizing it. His futile hope that he can make a difference by working with these bad actors and by being “the only adult in the room” is ultimately harmful, and tragically realistic — an encapsulation of the prevailing liberal strategies for dealing with the crises of our time.

A few people have said Don’t Look Up hard to watch. This is obviously because its subject matter is so anxiety-inducing — exaggerated and farcical abut also queasily real. I think it’s also because of the jarring editing rhythm, which very often cuts dialogue off in mid-sentence as it jumps to the next scene. It’s a film about frustration and anxiety, and not being listened to. That editing rhythm makes that frustration and that silencing of discussion and dissent visceral.

That said, I found it very absorbing to watch; despite its length I was reluctant to get up to go to the bathroom or pour a drink. I found the pacing and the editing thrilling, not off-putting. And despite the fact that it’s all about a real-life global emergency and the batshit denialism that’s now a daily part of life, I also found it curiously therapeutic.

The same day I watched Don’t Look Up , I got caught up in an extremely frustrating, even frightening thread about Omicron on Facebook. I’d posted a CNN article urging readers not to get the virus on purpose to “get it over with,” featuring interviews with a couple of epidemiologists detailing how dangerous Omicron can be. Somehow this most reasonable of positions — no, you should not catch COVID-19 on purpose — became my most controversial post of the year so far. Several friends and other followers argued; I got into a long discussion with someone who maintained it’s just like the flu and said I was “panicking” over nothing; a couple of them actually told me that indeed they planned to try and catch Omicron on purpose, or had already done so. I was so bewildered by all this that for a few hours at least I felt like giving up.

As the pandemic approaches its two-year mark (just typing that is so depressing), I’m more and more amazed at how mass suffering and death is increasingly ignored or normalized. I’m amazed at the risks people take and the excuses they make. But at the same time, I know why this is happening. There is no guidance, no genuine concern, no inspiration coming from our leaders at all. Two years ago we had lockdowns and some income support to help. Now, from Australia to the U.S. to the UK, our leaders are letting it rip and telling us to just get out there and get back to normal (“normal” meaning that profits are flowing for the rich). No wonder some people have just given up. Maybe we’re all giving up in our own ways.

“We’re all going to get it” is the new fatalistic catchphrase for this era of COVID — which seems like common sense until you remember it’s being promoted by a ruling class who only have their own interests in mind. If there isn’t a more eerie real-life echo of the film’s “Don’t look up” slogan, I don’t know what it is.

I mention all this to point out that Don’t Look Up doesn’t have to be just about the climate; it functions just as well as an extremely sharp satire about COVID: the government’s inattention to the emergency until it’s too late; their chaotic response, intended only to benefit the rich while the rest of the planet suffers; and the spread of denialism. It’s so spot-on it’s scary.

I also mention it to say that somehow, even though it’s so bleak, watching the film made me feel better about all this, made me feel less alone, less like giving up in all this horror and madness and greed and stupidity. The righteous anger of the protagonists, especially Dibiasky, made me smile. It made me feel good. It’s such an antidote to all that fatalism and toxic positivity. Somehow it inspired hope in me, and made me feel like getting back out there and fighting. I think it was intended to do that. (I’ve always felt some of the same ephemeral, improbable hope watching The Road and Children of Men , two dystopian masterpieces that also feature wonderful humanism.)

Some critics think Don’t Look Up is too wild and exaggerated to be effective commentary; or that the fictional comet is too singular and immediate a disaster to adequately represent the complex, overlapping outcomes of a climate emergency spanning decades. There’s never going to be a moment when we look up and see our doom. This view is argued insightfully by Emma Lee in Left Voice — it’s a very worthwhile read, though I disagree with some of her conclusions.

I think the film’s comet metaphor is perfect. Remember that some realistic scenarios laid out by climate scientists involve the end of civilization as we know it by the year 2100; and that we are reaching tipping points that make these apocalyptic scenarios more probable even earlier than scientists had predicted. In the face of this mounting evidence of apocalypse, the real capitalist class is literally doing what their counterparts do in the film. They are delaying solutions, scheming to preserve the fossil fuel industry — to preserve the real “comet” in other words — and hoarding their own wealth amidst the suffering of millions. Most importantly, they are actively fighting those who oppose them in myriad ways, including spreading denialist ideology. The only difference is that it’s taking place over a somewhat slower timeline than depicted in the film — 80 years instead of six months.

If you want a more immediate example, consider the way things played out here in Australia during the horrific bushfires of 2019–2020 — which, of course, were the direct result of climate change. (That linked essay of mine was originally going to be part of this one, but I realized I had a lot to say about my experience of the Australian bushfires, and it needed to be its own article.)

The fact that the superrich are investing in climate bunkers , houses on remote islands and even grandiose plans to colonize Mars in order to save themselves from climate breakdown — anything instead of shutting down production of fossil fuels or giving up even a portion of their wealth to help solve the crisis — shows that the spaceship analogy in the film isn’t so farfetched either.

Meanwhile, it’s telling that climate scientists and activists are saying that Don’t Look Up is very true to their own experiences of grappling with the media and the ruling class and trying to get the message out that it’s almost too late to prevent catastrophe.

There are too many other great things about the film to get into all of them. It kills me that Ariana Grande improvised some of the lyrics to “Just Look Up,” her character’s awareness-raising R&B track about the comet. “Get your head out of your ass / Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists.” The fact that the film pauses for a full, elaborately and beautifully staged performance of this song (featuring an appearance by Kid Cudi) is just one of many improbable delights it has in store.

Timothée Chalamet’s character, Yule, resonated deeply for me. I was very much like him at about the same age — struggling to reconcile the evangelical Christianity I was raised with and my anticapitalist, anti-imperialist politics. The effect was eerily like looking in a mirror. There might be some atheist viewers who are uncomfortable with the scenes in which he talks about God or prays — it could be interpreted as the screenplay justifying irrationality or backwards thinking. I thought it was a lovely depiction of humanity’s struggle to find meaning in the shadow of certain death, and unnecessarily rich and complex detail in a minor character.

Rylance’s loopy, disturbing performance as the billionaire Isherwell captures the suffocating ego and vapidity that characterize the superrich, especially honing in on the icky platitudes and pseudo-profound wisdom that mask their enormous, planet-threatening greed. Convinced of his own visionary genius, Isherwell carries himself like some kind of ethereal being, but it’s clear there’s no there there. It’s as if his personality has been taken over by one of his algorithms. He’s a comical reflection of a number of real-life figures, most obviously Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, with a bit of Richard Branson for good measure; but as with Streep’s character, the writing is too good to reduce it to mere caricature. Isherwell also lets McKay and Sirota go beyond the topic of the climate to skewer Big Tech, with sharp bits about automation, artificial intelligence and data retention. Whenever he’s onscreen the film is more overtly in a science fiction mode; the intertwining strands of politics and sci-fi give it unusual texture.

There’s another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment late in the film that speaks volumes about the real world. Shortly before the U.S.’s ill-fated privatized comet-capturing mission is launched, a competing mission co-funded by the Russian and Chinese governments to destroy the comet (the only sane thing to do, and clearly representing worldwide opposition to the U.S.) is scuttled when the rocket explodes at a Ukrainian launch site. Thus the hope of survival for the vast majority of the human race is dashed once and for all. The screenplay doesn’t overtly mention the U.S. military, but it doesn’t have to — we know that’s exactly who did it, intervening as you know they would in real life to protect U.S. interests. I’m not sure if something was cut from the film because criticizing U.S. imperialism was just a bit too spicy for Netflix, or if it was written to be that subtle. It works either way and it’s chilling.

During the beautiful and wrenching final scene, in which the defeated and doomed protagonists gather for a last home cooked meal and shared company just before the comet hits, they go around the table and take turns speaking about what they are grateful for at the end of everything. When it’s her turn, Kate Dibiasky says, “I’m grateful we tried.” I love this. Again, I don’t take it as a fatalistic shrug; I take it as the courage to resist in the face of seemingly hopeless odds, something that each of us owes future generations. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” Or as Huey P. Newton wrote in Revolutionary Suicide , “Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.”

It’s this mix of grim truth illuminated by the hope of resistance that lies at the heart of Don’t Look Up , and that makes it oddly inspiring. The characters in the film may be doomed, but we aren’t, not just yet. Out of all the film’s “heavy-handed” messages, that’s the one that should stick with us as we confront the terrifying crises of the real world.

The Ending Of Don't Look Up Explained

Adam McKay's satire "Don't Look Up" is all about the end. A star-studded cast is toplined by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as Dr. Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky, a professor and PhD candidate in Michigan State's astronomy department that discover a comet that will end all life on Earth in six months and 14 days. What follows is a disastrous series of meetings with American officials, histrionic press appearances, and one campaign of misinformation after the next as "Don't Look Up" answers the question: "What if 'Dr. Strangelove' abandoned all subtlety and restraint and yelled in your face a whole lot?"

A scathing indictment of capitalism, the Trump administration and government bureaucracy, celebrity worship culture, the internet at large, and many more things, "Don't Look Up" is a strange, roiling mix of things that functions primarily as an allegory for our lack of collective action to stop climate change. As it was made during the pandemic, it's impossible not to connect it to the larger, bungled response to Covid-19 as well. DiCaprio and Lawrence rise to the challenge of playing two regular people attempting to grasp with the concept of worldwide destruction while continuing to function in the world, and both have screaming meltdowns at one point that basically read as McKay yelling at the audience himself. It's a rollercoaster of tension and relief, in a certain way, to see the stakes of what we face as a planet made manifest emotionally for once. If everything is as bad as it seems, why are the news anchors always smiling? What are we supposed to do?

In its full-court press in every direction, "Don't Look Up" raises a few hundred times more questions than it proposes any answers or solution, but there's a cogent spirit underlying the broad mechanics of the plot and the absurdist actions of its authority figures. Obviously, thorough spoilers for the entire film follow . Here's the ending of "Don't Look Up" explained, presuming that the end of the world is a concept that we can even get our heads around to begin with.

The catharsis of annihilation

First things first: they don't pull off any "Armageddon"-style heroics in "Don't Look Up." Missions to deflect or destroy the comet are called off or blow up on the launchpad, and a final effort to blow the comet apart and mine the smaller pieces for precious minerals fails at the last minute. The worst of the worst, the power figures and wealthy elite that have utterly failed in the planet's time of need, escape the Earth in a secret ship (more on this later), but the vast majority of humanity goes out with the planet. Our heroes, such as they are, comfort themselves with the fact they at least tried their best to save everyone.

It's bleak, and not terribly surprising given the tone of the entire film beforehand. If "Don't Look Up" intends to serve as a call to action, it basically has to end with the destruction of the planet to outline the stakes that we're all facing. Climate change is real, and we're on the precipice of destruction as a species, and the pandemic has proved relatively conclusively that we're not prepared to work together to end it. Even accepting that there are limits to what we can do as individuals to affect it, the stakes of planetary peril can be clarifying and illuminating in terms of our lives. "Don't Look Up" wants to shake you loose with destruction like the ultimate chair-rattling "4D" theater experience.

Is Don't Look Up a film or a meta-textual essay?

a montage of social media images imploring us to

We live in an age when the distinction between media is blurrier than ever. Are the installments of the Marvel Cinematic Universe really "cinema" or just passably entertaining episodes of a 20+ part TV show that's in movie theaters? Similarly, "Don't Look Up" has more or less evenly divided critics on Rotten Tomatoes , because it's somewhere between a film and a two-and-a-half-hour visual essay about our times. Adam McKay has been essentially creating a new medium of storytelling beginning with "The Big Short" and "Vice," and at this point it's kind of silly to walk into "Don't Look Up" expecting a conventionally narrative story from the auteur of this new half-movie, half-editorial type of art.

"Don't Look Up" doesn't breach the fourth wall as directly as "The Big Short," which had Margot Robbie talk directly to viewers from a bubble bath, but it's much more relentless in the way that it toggles between tense, small human moments of its leads on the emotional brink, and madcap montages of social media clips going viral along with the talking heads of our 24-hour media cycle egging the public on to madness. Ariana Grande stars as a very Ariana-Grande-esque pop star whose breakup bumps the end of the world to the tail end of the news. In a clear meta-textual message, Meryl Streep plays the fictional President Orlean, named after her character in "Adaptation," a movie that screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wrote himself into and played with the very fabric of cinematic reality. Like Kaufman, McKay drops a hint that he's the one doing the talking, and wants us to have an awareness of all of his characters as paper dolls serving a larger purpose.

We really had it all, didn't we?

Kate Dibiasky, Randall Mindy and their family and friends sit down to dinner

After two hours of somewhat cold, over-the-top relentlessness, "Don't Look Up" crafts a poignant ending for the few characters with their hearts in the right place. As the rest of the world either descends into chaos or watches the doomed effort to split the comet up into pieces, the scientists that couldn't convince the world to do the right thing calmly shop for groceries and gather with their loved ones to await the inevitable.

The contrast to the rest of the film is what gives the scene its poignancy. As they buy food and prepare it for each other, as a father puts a reassuring hand on his son's shoulder, as they talk about our miraculous ability to just go to a store and get all the food we need, someone remarks that we sure "had it all" before we wasted it. If there's a moral or message that's of any use from "Don't Look Up," it's to take the literal "Look Up!" message spread by the heroic characters as literally as possible, to look up not just at the sky but to our loved ones' faces and the wonderful world that we still have. Montages of nature and small moments of human intimacy flash as the world ends, in another nod to both "Dr. Strangelove" and "Adaptation" at the same time, imploring us not to miss all of the gratitude we could feel for being alive in this strange, turbulent era to begin with.

Don't Look Up and Make America Great Again

President Janie Orlean points while wearing a "Don't Look Up" hat

If you're making a film that's explicitly tied to our looming battle with climate change, you have to save the most glaring indictment for the recent administration that removed nearly all mention of "climate change" from government websites. The fictional president, hilariously played by Meryl Streep, only reacts to the news of the comet when it's politically convenient, at first preferring to do nothing and downplay the threat much like the Trump administration downplayed Covid-19 in its earliest stages.

In an explicit tie, when the comet finally appears visibly in the sky, the president and her cronies begin a "Don't Look Up" campaign to convince people not to take the threat it poses seriously. "Don't Look Up" becomes a hashtag, rallying cry, and slogan on hats in a direct reference to "Make America Great Again." It's hard to gauge the success of any political element of the movie, since the various scandals, plural impeachments, and propensity for misinformation of the Trump administration combine with the revved-up modern news cycle so as to exist almost beyond parody, but in a way it grounds the film as the most recognizably pulled-from-reality element.

Greed on a personal scale

General Themes sits next to a table with snacks

While a trio of scientists wait for hours to see the President and give her the news of the comet's discovery, a gruff general played by Paul Guilfoyle comes back from the White House commissary with some snacks and water bottles. "They charge an arm and a leg for this stuff," he says. "Ten apiece ought to do it." Awkwardly, the scientists give him cash to inexplicably discover hours later the snacks and water were free. Of course they were, it's the White House.

Why then, did he do it? Jennifer Lawrence's character is borderline obsessed with speculating on why a Pentagon official would scam them out of 40 bucks for the rest of the story, even as the world nears its total annihilation. It's one of the smallest, funniest touches in the film, and it's never explained as she never gets a chance to corner the general for an answer. With this small touch, Adam McKay skewers the military industrial complex on the way to the apocalypse: with our infrastructure failing, our social services in dire need, and climate disaster looming, it's the defense budget that always goes up and is never questioned.

Peer review versus the billionaire savant

Elon Musk will not save us. Neither will Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, or any of the other CEOs of for-profit corporations that can't see the greater good without a profit incentive built in. That's the message behind Peter Isherwell, the CEO of fictional tech giant Bash Digital in the world of "Don't Look Up." He's played by Mark Rylance in a scene-stealing turn as a collection of soft-spoken, halting mannerisms, a sort of cross between Steve Jobs and a children's show mascot.

By the time an individual controls that amount of wealth, McKay points out, they have only the most warped, distant sense of the civic concern. In the movie, Isherwell engineers the abrupt cancellation of a NASA-backed effort to destroy or deflect the comet, and convinces the president to let his company lead a privately funded effort to blow it into smaller pieces, to harvest valuable minerals it contains. With no oversight and no respect for the larger scientific community, the mission fails utterly. McKay positions the scientific method and larger peer review method of reaching consensus as directly opposed to the false idols of tech CEO visionaries. People like Steve Jobs might change the world, but we can't look to them to save it.

Faith during the end times

Yule and Kate Dibiasky look at the stars

A surprisingly sweet character that shows up late in the movie, Timothée Chalamet's Yule is given the most compelling moment when he says a simple prayer during the final destruction of the planet. In a film about the literal end times, it's surprising that Yule is the only character that even mentions religion, and not even the Book of Revelation for that matter. Initially presented as part of a pack of nihilistic skaters that seem to have embraced the inevitability of humanity's doom, he soon reveals himself to be the most sensitive, thoughtful character, and a former evangelical Christian that found his "own relationship" with God.

In the end, his prayer brings visible solace to the rational scientists that he's having dinner with. It's an easy to miss, understated part of McKay's message, but it's key that Yule has his own relationship to God. At its worst, religion can divide us, but if we find our own version of it, whether it's God or the scientific method, faith can bring us closer to one another in the worst of times.

A new home for humanity

a group of naked humans explore a new planet

It's tempting to look to the stars for an answer if the Earth is doomed. A common scenario in science fiction is the idea of colonizing either Mars or some distant planet to save the human race. But the reality of those scenarios could easily result in only sparing the lives of a wealthy, privileged few, as happens in "Don't Look Up" when just a handful of VIPs join Peter Isherwell on his secret escape ship, entering cryo-stasis to sleep for thousands and thousands of years.

The reality of space travel in any form, however, is that it's dangerous and unforgiving: as technology currently stands we have a much better chance of saving the Earth than successfully leaving it behind. To drive this home, "Don't Look Up" has a mid-credits scene when the survivors, mostly white and elderly and leaving their ship naked and looking preposterously frail, are immediately beset by danger on a new planet. The President herself gets eaten by a "brontoroc," which had been cryptically predicted as her cause of death by an algorithm earlier. It's a final, bleak reminder of how even the 1% can't save themselves from the natural order of things, on this planet or the next.

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Don't Look Up

Leonardo DiCaprio, Ron Perlman, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Jonah Hill, Rob Morgan, Jennifer Lawrence, Timothée Chalamet, Kid Cudi, and Ariana Grande in Don't Look Up (2021)

Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn humankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth. Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn humankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth. Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn humankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.

David Sirota
Leonardo DiCaprio
Jennifer Lawrence
Meryl Streep
4.7K User reviews
318 Critic reviews
49 Metascore
24 wins & 95 nominations total

Top cast 99+

Dr. Randall Mindy

Kate Dibiasky

President Orlean

Brie Evantee

Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe

Jason Orlean

Peter Isherwell

Jack Bremmer

Benedict Drask

(as Scott Mescudi)

Dan Pawketty

Adul Grelio

General Themes

Congressman Tenant
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Trivia The Chicxulub asteroid Kate Dibiasky mentions hit Earth 66 million years ago in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. The estimated size of the asteroid was 10 kilometers (six miles) wide and resulted in 75% of all life on the planet dying. Known as the dinosaur killer, the asteroid left a crater estimated to be 150 kilometers (93 miles) in diameter and 20 kilometers (12 miles) in depth.
Goofs Astronomers turn off all the lights and screens within the dome when they take images of the sky.

Kate Dibiasky : You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for.

Crazy credits There are mid-credits and post-credits scenes.
Connections Featured in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Jennifer Lawrence/Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats (2021)
Soundtracks Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta F' wit Written by The GZA (as Gary Grice), Method Man (as Clifford Smith), Ol' Dirty Bastard (as Russell Jones), RZA (as Robert Diggs), Ghostface Killah (as Dennis Coles), Inspectah Deck (as Jason Hunter), Raekwon (as Corey Woods) and U-God (as Lamont Hawkins) Performed by Wu-Tang Clan Courtesy of RCA Records By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment

User reviews 4.7K

Dec 23, 2021
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December 24, 2021 (United States)
United States
Official Netflix
No miren arriba
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Hyperobject Industries
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$75,000,000 (estimated)

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Runtime 2 hours 18 minutes
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The reaction to netflix’s ‘don't look up’ is more interesting than the film itself.

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Jennifer Lawrence as Kate Dibiasky and Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr. Randall Mindy in “Don't Look Up."

We live in a pretty dreadful age for satire; it’s extremely difficult to exaggerate the current state of the world, so most satirical comedies choose to simply reflect it right back to us.

Hence, Don’t Look Up doesn’t hold up a funhouse mirror to our world - just a mirror. The film replaces our incoming mass extinction event, the climate crisis, with a meteorite hurtling towards Earth.

The film highlights the dismal failure of politicians to take the problem seriously (regardless of which side of the aisle they sit on), the self-destructive urges of greedy billionaires and delusional silicon valley dwellers, the scientists co-opted by corporate interests, along with the misinformation and conspiracy theories sparked by an event too terrible to acknowledge.

Although the film essentially stretches a single meme into two hours, it resonated with the public, reportedly attracting the biggest week of views in Netflix’s history. Many critics praised the film’s acknowledgment of the absurdity of the modern world, and one climate scientist wrote a moving essay emphasizing the film’s importance.

Other critics pointed out the film’s faults, and were chastised by the film’s fans, as well as climate scientists and activists, who seemed to associate criticism of the film with criticism of the film’s message.

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Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay even got defensive on Twitter, doing his best to conflate criticism of his film with climate denial.

Amusingly, this isn’t the first time McKay has defended his critically panned movie by accusing critics of lacking empathy.

Perhaps the most interesting (and honest) reaction to Don’t Look Up was that of journalist and environmental activist George Monbiot, who wrote an article stating that he saw his own struggle reflected in the film, recognizing the collective madness that the story depicts.

Not long after the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow, Monbiot broke down in tears on live television, during a discussion in which the hosts of Good Morning Britain framed climate change protesters as annoying and disruptive.

I recommend watching the clip - it's more powerful, more absurd, more infuriating than any scene from Don’t Look Up , and it is entirely real.

Don’t Look Up is not the first story to tackle climate change, and it won’t be the last. But fictionalizing the crisis is beginning to feel almost like a passive acceptance of our fate. And lashing out in despair at film critics, as though the right reaction to the right movie will spark meaningful change, doesn’t seem particularly productive.

Many millennials grew up watching media that was extremely environmentally conscious, such as Pocahontas , Fern Gully , Avatar, An Inconvenient Truth , and the films of Hayao Miyazaki, or playing games like Oddworld and Final Fantasy VII , which explicitly denounced capitalist greed, endless resource extraction, and emphasized the importance of protecting the planet from our worst impulses.

These stories often end with an individual successfully saving nature from being ravaged by industry. Perhaps, in hindsight, they should have emphasized collective action, but they are only stories; they are not instruction manuals on how to proceed.

Don’t Look Up marks a dramatic shift in tone, ending in armageddon, littered with dark humor that doesn’t exaggerate a thing. The film doesn’t have much to say about our world that we didn’t already know, but the reaction to it speaks volumes.

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Don't Look Up: Summary & Analysis

Language: English Director: Adam McKay Genre: Sci-Fi/ Comedy Runtime: 138 minutes

Don’t Look Up is a 2021 English language apocalyptic political satire film released in written, co-produced, and directed by Adam McKay from a story he co-wrote with David Sirota. The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead and other popular actors like Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, etc. playing pivotal roles. The American film with a runtime of 138 minutes was widely acclaimed among the critics as a great film for someone with a taste for dark humour and social satire.

The first scene in Don’t Look Up takes place at Michigan State University, where Lawrence’s character, Kate Dibiasky, a Ph.D. student in astronomy, uses the Subaru Telescope to find a previously unknown near-Earth asteroid. She tells her professor Dr.Randall Mindy (DiCaprio) about her discovery, and to their dismay, they learn that the object is a comet that would strike the world in six months, causing an extinction. President Janie and her son, Chief of Staff Jason Orlean, treat them with a great deal of indifference. They disregard the news as unimportant. Teddy implores Kate and Randall to release the information to the media to gain attention, but that also backfires. They appear on a morning talk show hosted by Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer, where they share alarming information regarding the planet’s demise. Unexpectedly, the hosts begin to laugh, and Kate becomes upset at their actions. To draw attention away from a sex scandal she becomes embroiled in, Janie has the director of NASA publicly refute the threat, but she later fires him herself. She reveals that the government intends to launch a spaceship into orbit in order to use weaponry to hit the comet and change its course. According to schedule, the shuttle takes off, but Peter Isherwell, the billionaire CEO of BASH and one of Janie’s top benefactors, forces it to return. He reveals that the comet contains priceless materials that are worth many trillions of dollars. This persuades the White House to gently rupture the comet and retrieve its fragments for industrial use from the ocean. While appointing Randall as the new National Science Advisor, the authorities snub Kate and Teddy. Kate, who is upset with how the government is handling the situation, claims that the top officials intend to let the comet hit the planet, causing an international uproar and riots. The government intimidates Kate and silences her as there is disagreement around the world about what should be done with the comet. Following a threat, Kate returns to Illinois and begins dating a young man named Yule, while Randall’s wife June learns of his infidelity at the same time. After this episode, he loses control and acts out on live television. He launches into a vicious tirade, accusing Orlean’s administration of delaying the impending end of the world and blaming humanity for its callousness. Naturally, the government cuts off Randall and he makes up with Kate just as the comet is finally seen from Earth, causing a disturbance in the populace. Teddy, Kate, and Randall launch the “Just Look Up” internet protest movement against Janie and BASH in an effort to attract support. They also exhort other nations to try and start comet-destroying activities. To reinforce their position, the White House Administration develops a competing campaign named “Don’t Look Up.” But the BASH mission fails and the planet life is destroyed while Peter along with the president and other billionaires escape in a spaceship and is cryogenically preserved until they find an earth-like planet.

We could witness conflicts between various binaries in the film. According to structuralism, binary opposition or binary conflict is the technique of classifying two ideas or concepts into opposing groups to examine how they relate to and interact with one another. People frequently establish binary opposition in real life, which can result in issues of exclusion and oppression in society, but the idea can also be used in writing. In literary contexts, the term “binary opposition” usually refers to groups of characters that can be divided into groups that are in opposition to one another. This classification enables authors to explore the motivations behind it and, on occasion, to dissect the potential harm that binary opposition may cause. The prominent one among them is the satirical exaggeration of scientific facts and how they are being denied in a highly politicized world by leaders. Politics and science, which are supposed to go hand in hand in society come into conflict when the administration is corrupt. World leaders make their decisions to benefit only the upper class, leaving behind the warning of a possible apocalypse in the trash. Humour is used in the film to poke at these tendencies in contemporary society, media, and political structure. Along with the indiscriminate manipulation of science, the film strongly emphasises how mass media can be often misleading and manipulates the public for capitalist gains. Scientific findings are questioned and are made anomalous for political needs. Hence, it is right to say that the film shows the conflict between science and politics. Framed within a pseudo-apocalypse background, the film doesn’t end like normal sci-fi with the world ending. It doesn’t have heroes or any twists and solutions. It is as realistic as what could happen if this was real. Di Caprio’s nerd professor and Jennifer Lawrence’s smart, spontaneous scientist are one-among-us yet memorable with the nonchalant depiction of all the sad truths that happen daily in our communities. The film is a warning about the overt manipulation of world leaders to rise to power and fame by sabotaging science and other factual information.

Indifference is another important theme presented throughout the film, where we could see people from different realms of society showing ignorance or apathy towards serious issues happening around them. Indifference could be defined as something that becomes problematic when there is a profound kind of rejection or lack of concern, interest, or enthusiasm for something important that could affect the life of people, yet they run behind puny matters. Throughout the film we see this indifference where both the well-educated group of people and the normal mob ignore a very serious disaster awaiting them as they are easily manipulated by power and greed. The very first indifference we see from the President herself and her son, who is not at all worried about the people’s safety or extinction but just wants to win the election at any cost. The media anchors who invite the scientists to discuss the big matter ends up mocking them which results in an outburst from Kate who is further trolled on social media. Here the media are showing great ignorance of such an emergency turning it into a mere joke. This approach even makes people think the same way which is something really dangerous and its aftermath is experienced by each and everyone in the end.

The film discusses these two themes with utmost importance from beginning to end. Science is often manipulated by politicians and other administrators in our society for their selfish needs and pseudoscience is often imposed on the public killing their scientific temper. Even in the film too, the politicians misuse science to improve their vote banks and to create profits for their donors like Peter Isherwell. The genuine discoveries of the scientists were mocked by these politicians, corporates, media and finally the people. The indifference we see here is the perfect portrayal of humans toward various serious environmental issues like climate change, global warming, etc. People just ignore these scientific facts just because they are not much affected. But by the time they realise the truth, it would be too late to survive. When the state and media prompted the mob to be indifferent, as in creating movements like “Don’t Look Up”, they really wanted the society to be ignorant and apathetic so that their greed would be met without much difficulty. Hence the movie shows justice to the selected themes and becomes a warning to the fragmented governance and the ignorant crowd.

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‘Don’t Look Up’ Summary & Review: The First of its Kind

Don't Look Up Summary & Review 2021 Film Leonardo Dicaprio

Doomsday films are no stranger to us. The end of times has donned several faces and served many iterations up to us on film. And yet, Adam Mckay’s film gives us a doomsday film that reveals how those earlier films that end with human triumph may simply be a symptom of our collective denial.

The World is Ending

Movies, and art are often required and expected to be a portrait of the times, gone by or present. With Don’t Look Up, we have a film that is crackling with a purpose that we haven’t quite seen with this conviction before. Along with the director, the cast has clearly committed to treating us to sharp edges.

The concept of the world ending is no stranger to us; we have certainly been treated to many threats in our lifetime. But hardly any have whipped us into a frenzy of do-good responsibility that the humans seem to have in such movies. In Don’t Look Up, the world is ending because of a comet set to hit the Earth in 6 months. A comet that is sure to cause worldwide extinction of our species and every other that roams the planet. But even after the science is verified a hundred times over, there is no urgency amongst the characters of the film, other than in the scientists.

The film chooses a specific and seemingly undeniable cause of our extinction. A singular entity, rather than a gradual phenomenon that shows symptoms in fits and bursts. But the comet is invisible to the eye and too far away in space. If we are capable of doubting a virus that has us dropping to the ground, the invisible comet can easily be ignored.

The 21st Century Response

Adam Mckay is brutal and incisive as he depicts the aftermath of Comet Dibiasky’s announcement to the world. From memes to internet challenges, talk show hosts that flirt with the handsome scientist, and Americans who deny the existence of the comet, we may as well be watching a documentary of our times.

There are moments when our rigid scientists, played by Leonardo Dicaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, give up. We watch them falter as they realize no one cares, that nobody can stop thinking about their life after the comet is supposed to hit, and that no one is willing to let everything go and focus on saving the planet and, consequently, themselves. It is difficult to watch, even though it is accompanied by a steady vein of humor. The humor does not cheer us up, because we know that we are not watching a film whose characters and events we can separate ourselves from. It is almost like the humor is put there to lure us in, making us laugh along to our own destined doom.

Look Up

Towards the end of the film, we finally see the meaning and genius of the film’s title. Because eventually, the threat will become undeniable, and the comet will shine in the sky we look up at. And finally, we think, ultimately, the people will understand. All the people.

But this is our world of complicated, stubborn, and remarkably individual human beings. A wave of people springs up, whose slogan is ‘Don’t Look Up.’ Deny, deny, deny. Ignore even the comet up in the sky because we have had this world for thousands and millions of years. It will not be stolen from us or destroyed. It couldn’t be. We are too powerful.

But there are few who do know, and do accept the truth. Few who fight until the very last moment that they can, hoping somewhere that if not America, another country will do the right thing. And when all efforts fail, every human must choose their spot on the Earth to make their last stand. Quietly, in comfort and love and good food, or in violence or inches deep in denial still.

Also Read: ‘Don’t Look Up’ Ending, Explained – Who Survived In The Post Credits Scene?

Don’t Look Up is not a kind movie, but perhaps, one of the bravest and most honest to demand our attention in recent times. The film is streaming on Netflix.

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Film Review: “Don’t Look Up” — A Pitch-Dark Satire that Dares to be Impudently Pessimistic

By Daniel Gewertz

The knee-jerk, hateful reviews of Don’t Look Up possess comments so outsized, and so beside the point, that they bear a resemblance to the oblivious thinking of the movie’s anti-science ostriches.

Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett. On Netflix

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in Don’t Look Up.

Don’t Look Up is a clever, unapologetically brash satire about a future America so consumed with celebrity worship, brain-numbing infotainment, social media popularity, and political gamesmanship that it refuses to take the impending destruction of planet Earth seriously. We’re not talking climate change here, though the parallel is obvious. Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) has irrefutable evidence that an unprecedentedly gigantic comet will wipe out Earth in precisely six months, 14 days. The chances of “planet extinction” are set at 99.78%.

“Call it 70% and let’s just move on,” says President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), who’s more bothered by the upcoming midterms and the unearthing of nude pics of her sexy boyfriend, a Supreme Court nominee.

Are you an unabashed pessimist about 21st-century America? Do you believe that we’ve reached a point that — to quote W.B. Yeats — “the center cannot hold”? And, most of all, are you in the apparent minority who understands that true satire is a purposeful exaggeration of reality? If so, I say just give this liberating, appropriately cynical, fitfully hilarious film a look.

Despite an abundance of cinematic virtues, Don’t Look Up has been met with more negative reviews than raves, and a Rotten Tomatoes rating of just 55%. Critics from all political segments of the mainstream media have joined the surprisingly ferocious attack on this expertly made comedy. The Wall Street Journal and Britain’s Guardian exhibited outright loathing; The Guardian ‘s Charles Bramesco went so far as to complain that the movie might “drive away any [anti-science] partisans who still need to be won over,” as if the film were some sadly tone-deaf BBC News Hour segment.

The newspapers and websites most joined at the hip to the movie industry — from Variety to the Hollywood Reporter — were so venomous, it’s as if they believe this film is a danger to the American dynasty and their own jobs. The word smug crops up in nearly every pan. Is it a mere matter of blaming the messenger? And yet, this movie is hardest on political elites, tech billionaires, and mass and social media — not your average American. Perhaps the underlying belief is that rich movie actors have no right to rock their gravy boat.

The National Board of Review, meanwhile, named Don’t Look Up one of the top movies of 2021. The Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Movie Awards gave it best picture nominations.

To put it in terms of cinematic style: The critics cannot appreciate a star-laden, pitch-dark satire that dares to be impudently pessimistic in vision and big in execution. If this film had a slower pace, a smaller budget, and a less famous cast it likely wouldn’t have been as good, or as funny, but it might have received more positive reviews. The obvious comparison here is Idiocracy (2006), a far smaller, daffier film — and certainly one more prescient, since it was released 10 years before the arrival of the idiot Trump-train. But being a low-budget Mike Judge production — a niche film — it was less dangerous.

My guess is that Don’t Look Up ‘s bitterly satiric stance threatens a middle-of-the road political complacency. It intimidates the reviewers’ apparent bedrock belief that our centrist, big-business establishment — be it left-leaning or right — will solve our real-life apocalypse movie: the global-warming disaster. That “profits over planet” mindset is a smugness that is killing us.

Admittedly, the satiric volume here — to use a Spinal Tap reference — is set at 11. But despite this volume, and a slightly excessive 2-1/4 hour length, Don’t Look Up is one of the best-executed comic movies in years. Its script bristles with witty, incisive details; its dramatic arc is effective. McKay is known for writing and directing The Big Short — one of the most lauded films of 2015 — as well as helming various funny but shallow comedies ( Anchorman, The Other Guys). He had a ’90s stint as SNL’s head writer, not one of the show’s best eras. Broad sketch comedy may have paved the way for McKay, but rest assured: this film has some subtleties.

The first few scenes — depicting the discovery of the comet’s size and destructive course — are not played for laughs. Dr. Randall Mindy, a Michigan State University astronomy professor (DiCaprio), and his assistant, doctoral candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), discover a comet of mind-blowing size that, according to repeated calculations, is headed straight for Earth. Their certainty and shock are well dramatized. The two scientists are soon whisked off to DC, and by the time we see them waiting outside the Oval Office, anxious to see the president of the United States, the film has set up a tension that is palpable.

And then, the satire hits. We’ve seen Streep portray quiet, dignified power before. This isn’t it. She plays this future POTUS as a shallow monster of self-satisfaction, surrounded by photos of herself arm-in-arm with Hollywood celebrities. In the Oval Office, her smug smile is ever ready to turn to bored irritation. What she pulls off here is a letter-perfect encapsulation of the rotting soul of America. But still, she’s funny. Her own son is her chief-of-staff, Jason Orlean (Jonah Hill has fun playing an asshole, but it’s the film’s lone one-note performance.)

As Dr. Mindy tries to tell the world of its impending destruction, DiCaprio portrays, at first, a collapse of composure — something that is seemingly the most deplorable sin in a media-ready society where a confident outer shell has vanquished our deeper understandings.

Dr. Mindy: “It will have the power of a billion Hiroshima bombs.”

Jason: “You’re breathing weird. It’s making me uncomfortable.”

DiCaprio’s character travels a plausible arc here: first, he devolves into panic; then, with media coaching, transforms into a smooth, fatherly TV science-guy while simultaneously entering the sexy highlife as the adulterous lover of America’s most watched news-magazine host (an astonishing Cate Blanchett.) And then, by film’s end, he has believably revivified his humanity. Lawrence’s Kate Dibiasky’s reactions to her plight — from tense to tumultuous to totally checked out — make similar sense. Despite the bigger-than-life satiric thrust, one is emotionally tied to the two main characters.

Meryl Streep in Don’t Look Up.

Blanchett’s part isn’t huge, but she’s still able to dig beneath the shell of a shallow media star. Brie is the sex-hungry host of The Daily Rip , a meretricious Good Morning, America –type show that has either replaced newscasts, or just murdered them in the ratings. She’s a slick, sinuous over-achiever, highly educated, utterly amoral. When faced with a potentially emotional situation — be it a new bedmate desiring some innocuous personal info, or a furious wife confronting the adulterous couple — Brie simply looks bored and asks if it is really necessary to “do” this part of the routine. Yet Blanchett is so alive to the moment she can perceptively mine a hidden ore of humanity, a long buried nugget. When Dr. Mindy and Brie part ways — and the doctor tells her he’d been close to feeling love for her — Blanchett’s Brie is visibly startled by the word “love”: a look of shocked wistfulness flits over her glossy countenance, as if she’d just remembered love as a concept hidden away in a childhood memory. And then her eyes dismiss the idea as sadly irrelevant, and she’s gone. It is the kind of subtlety that humanizes a wicked satire, but doesn’t defang it.

The character of Sir Peter Isherwell, the billionaire tech guru and essentially the world’s most powerful man, is also a gem. Mark Rylance plays him as a robotic Elon Musk/Mark Zuckerberg type. His god-like algorhythmic control is so great that he knows more about every human than they do about themselves — and also can predict the exact date and cause of each human’s eventual death. (That tidbit is used to hilarious effect in the closing scene featuring President Orlean.) When Dr. Mindy criticizes Isherwell’s plan to monetize the looming catastrophe — calling it the thinking of “a businessman” — the mogul goes berserk at the perceived mega-insult.

Ariana Grande, Timothée Chalamet, Rob Morgan, and Melanie Lynskey are all excellent in this beautifully cast comedy.

In the end, the knee-jerk, hateful reviews of Don’t Look Up possess comments so outsized, and so beside the point, that they bear a resemblance to the oblivious thinking of the movie’s anti-science ostriches.

True satire is often deadly at the box office. Even a masterpiece like Alexander Payne’s 1999 Election lost money . Hollywood’s most common version — satire lite (a lightly scathing comedy with a happy ending) — is a far easier sell. It suggests to the viewer that heaven exists. But if the characters aren’t likable, the details not standard movie realism, the ending not cheery, the charges are often: How smug! How unrealistic! Don’t Look Up is intended as an active spin on reality, and not a charitable one. True satire is anti-romantic. It should come with a warning: cynicism, in the service of truth, is no sin. Is it possible, in 2022, to be cheered up by a good film about the bad end of the world? The thought that society sucks and then you die isn’t uplifting, true, but a smart film such as Don’t Look Up proves to the pessimists that we have company! We are not alone! We are not crazy! There are others like us on this Earth.

For 30 years, Daniel Gewertz wrote about music, theater and movies for the Boston Herald , among other periodicals. More recently, he’s published personal essays, taught memoir writing, and participated in the local storytelling scene. In the 1970s, at Boston University, he was best known for his Elvis Presley imitation.

36 Comments

Great writing about a truly excellent film.

Thanks, Al. Great to hear from you. I remember sitting with you at the Shamrock Bar in Inman Square, Cambridge on the night of Election Day 1980, an hour after it was announced that Ronald Reagan was to be our next president. We thought it was the end of America and the world. And in a way, we were right. Now, there is no Shamrock, and Ronald Reagan is held up by the mainstream media as a good guy Republican, the unTrumpian hero. But the road to American and planetary ruin was paved that night 41+ years ago.

Great review: spot on! (But “algorhythmic”… hmm… not sure that’s a word!)

Well, but ‘algorithmic’ does, JD! So does algorithmically, in fact.

I agree it’s a better movie than the sourpusses will allow. But I would add you don’t mention the reason I forgave it some of its undeniable infantilism, namely the camera pointed toward the starry cosmos near the end. At that point the film outflanked its tiktok pessimism and delivered to me, anyway, a feeling of awe.

Agreed, especially in light of the current and literal unfolding of the Webb telescope. What new, amazing, and potentially frightening and awe-inspiring discoveries await us?

When Karl Rove once defiantly proclaimed about the Bush White House that “we create our own reality,” Americans who cherish our democracy were not properly terrified by the notion that one of our two major political parties had essentially abdicated any and all responsibility toward preserving that democracy. The advent of Trump America put that notion on steroids and hastened the hellish rampage of lies, misinformation and denialism that pervades half of this nation. It is ugly and dark and stress-inducing in ways we of a certain age never dreamed we’d experience. So when a filmmaker decides to take direct aim at the maelstrom with a dark satire, one that forces us to examine the insanity but gives us the release of laughter in the face of doom, it should be celebrated. Don’t Look Up is not a great movie but it is an important one at an opportune time. People condemning it are taking the wrongs things way too seriously.

Glad to read this review and the follow-up comments. I’m on board.

Trying to figure out why the film didn’t ‘hit’, the way The Big Short’ did. It might be an editing thing – too much slam bam; story kind of implodes with its unrelenting humor. But, I loved the writing and wish, above all, that the groups being satirized see themselves. (Right. Like that’s going to happen…)

It is a ridiculous over the top rightly criticized by critics. If the critics are saying they don’t like it then that must mean something…do we really need overpaid, delusional, totally not in reality rich celebs telling us what to think? Probably not…

Maybe not — but maybe so — when celebrities are amplifying what the leading scientists have been warning us about for decades, forecasts of disaster that have not been receiving sufficiently serious attention from our “overpaid, delusional, totally not in reality” leaders and mainstream media.

Apparently we really do need that.

At the very end, when the personality on Patriot News says that the only issue people are paying attention to at that moment was “Topless urgent care centers” I thought, yeah, that pretty much sums up our news coverage of not only climate change , but the forty-year evisceration of our democracy (true journalists, especially investigative ones, are a dying breed and we have been left with personalities in journalists’ clothing).

A bit of me feels like the movie itself is the dinner among friends for those of us who do not see us getting out of this. As we lose democracies, we lose our best chance to manage climate change. So, cheers.

It’s a good movie not a great one, as many have said. But it’s entertaining. Far from constantly funny– the writing only occasionally rises to either very apt, or hilarious. But the simple Cassandra story works –mostly, I think, because it is essentially correct about the terrifying things happening in our world. One thing it is not is celebrities telling us what to think– these are actors, doing their actual job, very well. They may be well known actors, but they are doing what they do best– getting the ideas of writers and a director across to us– and it is writers who do the job of dramatizing, or humorizing, a viewpoint. I have no idea if this movie will have any affect on our urgencies–probably not. It won’t be alone in this. And I agree with the reviewer– that extreme negativity about the film has probably got political motivation at its base.

Excellent film! Completely concur with Gewertz’ review. I just hope the people that need to see both, actually do!!

It was a great movie but too sad and depressing. I am a scientist and I saw so many scenes not as parody but totally factual events I have actually lived. In the end, I do wonder if we deserve this planet, and if as a species we deserve to be here. Anyways, just talking to the vacuum.

Thank you so much for this insight. It’s so rare to get a scientist’s perspective on a film like this and yet so very necessary at this point in time.

No wonder journalists have slated it. They’ve produced a hundred excuses not to watch the climate breakdown satire Don’t Look Up: it’s “blunt”, it’s “shrill”, it’s “smug”. But they will not name the real problem: it’s about them. The movie is, in my view, a powerful demolition of the grotesque failures of public life. And the sector whose failures are most brutally exposed is the media. –George Monbiot, The Guardian

One thought I had while writing the piece was that the film-critics who absolutely loathed it were not all right-wing capitalists who’d love to squash the ecology movement, but mainstream types who, like many millions of others, don’t wish to be rudely reminded that we have already arrived at the birth of the end. In other words, the smug and the blind… but not the extremists who claim global warming is all overblown lefty radical nonsense. It must be unnerving to get reminded that maybe you, and surely your grandchildren, will suffer and die because of your cowardice and blasé numbskull obliviousness. So, sure, blame it all on rich movie stars!

You touched on it briefly in the review but it really hit me how the response of reviewers to this film is a perfect, seemingly unwitting reflection of all the establishment types in the film: My God, do we really have to be hit over the head with all this depressing mess! Lighten up! Well, whether the film changes anybody’s mind is up for debate but this film simply had to be made. I would also like to mention a non-satirical but parallel vision of society in a made-for PBS film, The Peoples Republic of Desire. A truly sad and terrifying view of China’s digital idol-making world.

Vincent Czyz mentions climate activist George Monbiot, so I just wanted to point out that Monbiot’s famous breakdown on “Good Morning Britain” last year now seems like an eerie harbinger of Jennifer Lawrence’s crack-up on “The Daily Rip” in the movie. And therein lies the rub for the film’s detractors: how can “Don’t Look Up” be “over the top” and “smug” when so many of its turning points mimic real-life incidents? I agree, btw, with Daniel Gewertz’s suggestion that film critics unconsciously saw themselves in its sights – hence the vituperative pans; this insight has already begun to generate its own discussion online, btw. (Film critics don’t support climate denial, yet can’t see how they’re part of the system supporting it – discuss!!) But I would take some issue with a few of Gewertz’s comments. The movie is often great – no question – but it IS choppy, and there’s a kind of vagueness to the satire at its core. In my opinion, Streep never quite finds her feet in the role of President Orlean, and I think it’s partly because McKay hasn’t delineated the role as sharply as he might have. You could describe Orlean as a Trump-Hillary hybrid; one part nepotist redneck, one part Hollywood/Silicon Valley glad-hander. But how exactly do these two parts come together . . ? Orlean’s persona never quite taps into the tribal/racist glue that keeps Trump’s coalition together – nor is McKay willing to take the gloves off when it comes to the Democratic Party’s financial romance with Silicon Valley. So there’s a kind of void at the heart of the movie – but still much (MUCH) to love about it. I’m heartened to see it’s back to #1 on Netflix, with 150 million viewing hours last week alone. That’s what, maybe 70 million viewers? Sounds like a global hit to me . . .

Love your parenthetical comment on film critics denying they are part of the system. I don’t think there are two equal parts to Streep’s prez. There’s far more Hillary than Trump, but not meant to be a specific statement on the Dem’s Silicon Valley corrupt romance. Her character is slippery and slimy as today, just two steps further down smug road.

Well, not to go on and on about it, but when Streep is eventually shown sporting a MAGA-style hat at a redneck rally, it’s hard to believe she’s not intended to reflect Trump in some way. Her dumb-as-f son likewise channels Don Jr. and Eric far more than Chelsea. And while I’m not at all disagreeing with you about the Clinton slime factor, there’s a famously studious, by-the-numbers core to Hillary that Streep also doesn’t tap. I actually think a character working the common ground between Clinton and Trump was an inspired idea; I just don’t think Streep and McKay give it the same brilliant edge they brought to so much else in this remarkable film.

The most entertaining aspect of this mediocre film is the subsequent civil war between America’s blue and red political tribes — a war about a movie, for Chrissake. Led by General Chicken Little, the Blue tribe squawks that global warming is going to destroy the world in “six months and fourteen days.” General Little and his hens have been bawk-bawking this alarm for approximately 52 years. The red tribe responds by digging in even deeper, denying objective reality itself. Why? Because tribalism, like religion, is a powerful drug.

Glad he is entertained. This is the kind of muddled, curse-on-both-your houses thinking that is about finding a way to blame the left for being alarmist. If only those who believed in climate change had been reasonable instead of a bunch of Chicken Littles — curse them! Yes, there is objective reality — but it has to sold in a palatable way to the non-tribal. A marketing problem!

Reputable scientists since the ’70s have talked about the slow but sure progression of Climate Change. There has been an ongoing controversy about just how fast changes were going to come about. Looks like the transformation may be happening at a quicker clip than predicted: “Last year saw the hottest ocean temperatures in recorded history, the sixth consecutive year that this record has been broken, according to new research.”

I tried to watch it the first time, but gave up after half an hour. I managed to finish it the second time. The film is too clever by three-quarters. Meryl Streep’s presence alone (after her bizarre “Laundromat” turn) threatens to reduce the film to a stunt. The rest of the big names in the cast make good that threat. It reminds me of Mars Attacks more than Dr. Strangelove . McKay’s buckshot approach can’t possibly hit any of the targets he aims for. Rejecting subtlety throughout the film, he strangely opts for sentimentality in a family dinner finale worthy of a Saturday Evening Post cover—without Norman Rockwell’s edge. Soon after this, the film tries to throw a punch via the tramp stamp revealed on Streep’s body double’s exposed lower back. A weak joke follows the endless credits. McKay’s lack of comic timing is the pay-off.

This movie is terrible. I only attempted watch it because Leonardo had the lead role. But unfortunately it was a huge Titanic. In the sinking way. To me, it made fun of our joke of a government, which, without a doubt is true. But really. The president, and the presidents “coke head” right hand. The best part, is when she was killed.

Too much carping at critics, Dan, for not sharing your opinion. I am one of those lame critics who didn’t think much of this movie, but my disappointments come from the left and hopefully not from the mainstream. Much of the movie is smug and obvious and badly done comedy. I loathed all the stuff with Meryl as President. Surprisingly it came together for me in the hardest part to pull off, the apocalytpic ending. Otherwise, pretty mediocre, and proof once again that a great theme doesn’t necessarily make a good film. I recall the NY Times critic raving on and on about the end-of-the-world 1950 film, On the Beach, predicting it would be remembered forever, generation after generation. Wrong! Nobody remembers this crappy movie with a stirring Big Theme. I predict the same fate for Don’t Look Up . There were at least sixty better films in 2021.

I would not call Don’t Look Up smug so much as lazy. It is a slip slide mix of sketch comedy, broad satire, and sentimentality. The script could have been much sharper. (The fossil fuel industry, for example, a fount of climate change misinformation and political corruption, is pretty well given a pass.) Perhaps, as more irreparable damage is done to the earth and its vulnerable populations, we will generate comedies as scathing as Dr Strangelove. Though I think dramas that tap into the absurdist comedy of Beckett and Ionesco would be more fitting. A writer just needs to rejigger a sentiment in Endgame : “Nothing is funnier than extinction, I grant you that…”

We are moving in that tragic direction. This from the January 10 Guardian on US carbon emissions: “We expected a rebound but it’s dismaying that emissions came back even faster than the overall economy,” said Kate Larsen, a partner at Rhodium Group, the independent research firm that conducted the analysis. “We aren’t just reducing the carbon intensity of the economy, we are increasing it. We are doing exactly the opposite of what we need to be doing.”

I take critic James Agee’s position: films are mass entertainment and don’t need to be complete successes to be of use . Let us hope that this is the first of a number of movies, documentaries, plays, books, etc that take up the slack left by the mainstream news media, which has found that covering the climate crisis in a sustained fashion is not good for ratings. (It can be so alarming .) If the popular success of Don’t Look Up — and the conversations it is spurring — inspires other efforts, it will be worth remembering …

Well, that’s classic Gerald Peary right there.

It may be labeled a movie review, but it is clear from the pull-quote at the start to the multiple paragraphs at its center that this is a view of the reviews. That is its main thrust. When a movie this well-crafted and timely is massacred by so many critics with such vitriol and venomous platitudes, it makes me think that something very odd is going on here. and that’s what I wrote about. To be clear, I have not been a semi-regular movie critic since about 1995, and with the plunge of quality in both big-budget and indy films in recent years I certainly don’t want to be one now. But I am well-schooled enough in 20th century cinema to realize the oddity of your bringing up a deadly serious, plodding social drama such as “On the Beach” (Stanley Kramer, 1959) in reference to the satiric comedy “Don’t Look Up.” Let us fight about directors, critics and genres another time! But I hope we can avoid the ancient fights from the ’60s about Grade B films being better than Grade A or vice versa. Now we have 100 million dollar budgets for Grade B schlock, and substantial takes on big social themes are nearly nonexistent.

Well guys, from the perspective of a South African (who LOVED the movie) all the above comments prove there are still a lot of right-thinking people in America. All is not lost!

Thank goodness for this review – I watched last night, and aside from it being about 30 mins too long, thorough enjoyed it for all the reasons you state. This is why I only read the reviews *after* watching/reading and deciding for myself. But I’ll definitely stay tuned for yours in future

Thanks, Shelley. No matter how many oddball reviews are out there, from critics and fans alike, at least it is better than the old days, when all that was available, pre-Internet, for non-current films, was Leonard Maltin’s annual book, where “Sophie’s Choice” was given 2 & 1/2 stars, but a soapy western called “The Naked Spur” got 3 & 1/2.

The critics who carped about “Don’t Look Up” might well cringe at watching this recent side-by-side comparison of one of the film’s “satiric” sequences and a recent British television segment on climate change . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzzGlyeI2WM

Coming in late to the party here, but this is the single-handedly best drive-by analysis of this amazing movie. Truth is, almost everyone took some form of offense to “Don’t Look Up”. And I get that, truly, I do. It’s acerbic and pointed – just as much as it’s an equal opportunity offender. It’s equally as vicious towards deep blue as it is deep red, it’s unrelenting on today’s op-ed driven ‘news for dipshits’ journalism, social media driving the importance of news, hell, even the name of the liquor store “DrinkMo!” is a harsh indictment (to say nothing of the $700 shovels, the importance of which we’ll never understand).

Is it a perfect film? I don’t know – that’s so relative. But it’s unrelentingly honest and it’s got some very sharp teeth. It’s the doomsday version of “Idiocracy”, who’s crucial flaw is the assumption humankind is going to make it another 100 years (much less 500).

I really appreciate your analysis. Most of the negative reviews are from people who feel oddly singled out… or from people who can’t appreciate just how accurate the hyperbole of it all is. Like Idiocracy? It’s not saying anything that’s not already true.

This movie was brilliant in the sense that human-driven climate change should be just as obvious as a giant rock about to fall on our heads.

It was also a total lost cause from the get-go because it was always guaranteed to fail to reach and educate the ostriches who defecate on peer-reviewed science in favor of worshipping a Bronze Age book of fairy tales, and believe that an invisible wizard from beyond the sky will save us all with his magical powers if we’re just pious enough.

At this point, there is just one thing that will save this world’s future: America falling off the top of the mountain, as quickly as possible. Say what you want about China’s human rights record, but Beijing would never let brain-dead religious fools or moneygasming businessmen to stop them from nuking that comet out of the sky. Neither would any other national government not located in a city called Washington. The level of self-destructive stupidity our nation has reached is beyond any possibility of hope or redemption until our time to be in control of the world has passed. Even then, I give us a 50% chance of just socially imploding from within.

If the leadership of humanity is spread between Chinese, Indians, Europeans, and every other civilized nation in the world, with America out of the way, the entire planet has a far better chance than it does right now.

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Adam McKay goes in depth on four important ‘Don’t Look Up’ scenes

By John Hazelton 2022-02-15T13:07:00+00:00

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Don’t Look Up scored a monster hit with audiences when it landed on Netflix in December. Filmmaker Adam McKay tells John Hazelton about his creative approach to four memorable scenes in the allegorical climate-change comedy.

Source: Niko Tavernise/Netflix

‘Don’t Look Up’

Adam McKay was worrying about the climate crisis when the idea for a killer-comet story came up. The writer/director/producer, known for comedies ranging in tone from Anchorman and Step Brothers to The Big Short and Vice , recalls talking to US journalist David Sirota “about how the media doesn’t cover what is empirically the biggest story in human history. And David said, ‘Yeah, it’s like the asteroid’s coming in Armageddon and no-one cares.’ I couldn’t shake that. I thought if people could laugh and at the same time feel that urgency, this could be really good.”

The result is Don’t Look Up , McKay’s Netflix-backed satire (on which Sirota gets a story credit) following low-level astronomers Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) as they struggle to warn indifferent politicians, upbeat TV hosts and a social-media-obsessed public about a comet set to destroy Earth in six months’ time.

Shot early in the pandemic and boasting a star-studded ensemble — Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Mark Rylance, Ariana Grande and Ron Perlman all join Lawrence and DiCaprio — the film took some critical hits but topped Netflix’s English-language global chart for three weeks after its late-December release, and now stands as the streamer’s second most popular film of all time.

Don’t Look Up has also emerged as a dark-horse awards contender, with four Bafta nominations (including best film and best original screenplay) and the ensemble earning a Screen Actors Guild awards nomination for outstanding cast performance.

Screen International spoke to McKay about four key scenes from the film (please note, some of the director’s comments contain spoilers).

Kate and Randall meet the president in the Oval Office

The scene: Soon after spotting the comet headed for Earth, Kate, Randall and Planetary Defense Coordination Office head Dr Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) go to the White House to explain the implications to US president Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her sycophantic son and chief of staff Jason (Jonah Hill). The president opts to “sit tight and assess”.

Adam McKay: “That’s the scene that sets the tone for the entire movie. It’s a strange movie in that it’s a ridiculous comedy yet at the same time very tragic and dramatic, and this was the definitive scene. If we didn’t get it right it would throw the whole movie off.

“We shot it over three days, with a lot of angles and a lot of coverage. And we got amazing performances — Streep was crazy, Jonah was doing brilliant improv, all the actors were doing improv. So I was really happy with the filming, and the footage looked beautiful.

“My editor Hank Corwin cut a rollicking, insane version of the scene that was 12 or 14 minutes long. But with our goal of this being a worldwide movie, I wanted to test-screen it. And when we did that the audience just checked out. I don’t let test screenings dictate what I do, but I could feel the movie unplug at that point and the energy drain.

“What we learned was that the audience was very divided. The scene was exaggerated because we felt like the world we’re living in is utterly rudderless. Then the audience went, ‘No, a bunch of us think there is a rudder.’

“The insane version totally shook the audience — they no longer had a straight line. You have this comedy dynamic where you have to keep your straight line alive in order for the jokes to puncture it. Fortunately, we had done a lot of improv and there were a lot of different tones in it. We needed the Oval Office to have authority, so we re-edited, pulled some things back and let some things explode, and we had to do that with every beat in the scene.

“We worked it for five, six months. I’ve done three movies and a TV show with Hank and we’ve never encountered such a beast of a scene. I’m going to put [the original version] out at some point.”

Kate and Randall appear on The Daily Rip

The scene: Hoping to alert the public directly to the impending disaster, Kate and Randall agree to be interviewed on The Daily Rip, a fluffy morning TV show hosted by the smart and glamorous Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) and the charmingly dumb Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry). Kate gets frustrated with the hosts and storms off the set, while Randall is distracted by Brie’s attentions.

Adam McKay: “That scene shows our ‘corporate good-cheer’ media rolling over the truth, which obviously has been happening a lot over the past 10, 20, 30 years. So it’s both preposterous and funny, but at the same time very real.

“There were a couple of things that needed to happen with the scene that were very difficult. One was the set, which [production designer] Clayton Hartley and his team designed in an out-of-business car dealership. Normally with a scene like that you would have the camera perspective and one angle, but I told them it had to feel like it does when you actually go on these shows — which as a writer/director I’ve done a few times. It always feels vast and disorienting, and so we needed depth to it — and Clayton did an incredible job.

“From Linus [Sandgren, director of photography], I wanted that shot of the point of view when they go on stage and how weird it feels. That’s a key moment for Dr Mindy — he’s in this pressure situation and he actually does pretty well and the beautiful host of the show flirts with him, and everyone says how great he looks.

“The other thing the scene needed was the chemistry between Cate and Tyler playing Brie and Jack. A character says earlier that they have ‘legendary chemistry’, but good luck with that when you have actors who were not able to rehearse in person — though we did some Zoom rehearsals — showing up on the day during a pandemic.

“Fortunately, I had two of the most talented actors you could ever have, full of charisma and ability. It was amazing when they showed up and met in person for the first time wearing their weird masks and plastic covers — within five minutes they had this chemistry that was incredible.

“I told them to use the script as their guideline but to play around with it. So what you see in that scene is a tour de force of two great actors who know how to listen and collaborate.”

President Orlean tells the world about the killer comet

The scene: From the deck of a battleship, president Orlean, with Randall and Kate nervously in attendance, addresses the world and names mercenary Benedict Drask (Ron Perlman) to lead a mission to knock the comet off course. The speech is intercut with the president at a White House meeting two nights earlier, and viewers watching on TV.

Adam McKay: “We’ve seen a lot of presidents do those bizarre, manicured speeches in front of symbols. This is a rich American tradition, dating from that moment when America decided to stop living in reality and everything became a photo op. And it goes across the red/blue divide. [Former UK prime minister] Tony Blair was a fan of them as well.

“That battleship was an actual location. I’d originally scripted it as being in front of the Washington Iwo Jima monument and they have a smaller version of that in Massachusetts so we were going to film there, but Mark Fitzgerald, our Boston location scout, knew about the battleship.

“I scripted the scene with the cuts between the curated speech on the battleship and the White House, the idea being that it was a ‘time dash’ back and forth. And Hank [Corwin] said it worked really well like that. He’s an unusual editor, with this sense of timing and perspective that I think captures the real world we live in, with this crazy bombardment of information, in a funny and surprising way.

“I love time dashes and breaking time. Twenty years ago, it would have been an unusual way to frame the scene, but audiences have become so sophisticated and are used to so many challenging ways of telling stories. In some ways classical narrative structure doesn’t apply now — it’s not the way we’re living now. Our stories are not just simple stories, we’re always living in about four or five stories. And comedy is always based on surprise and people being slightly off balance, so the intercutting helped with that as well.

“What I love about the sequence is you’re seeing the president, who’s a master of media spin, planning the manipulation that’s coming and then you’re going directly to the manipulation. And then the third element is you’re cutting around the world to people watching it on TV and social media. From my first time working with Hank on The Big Short , both of us were interested in capturing that chaotic feeling of social media.

“Ron Perlman’s character was also about trying to capture that feeling of what it’s like to be alive now. There’s always some politically incorrect, larger-than-life character bouncing around our world and I wanted that to be Colonel Drask.”

The BASH mission launch and the Mindy family dinner

The scene: Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), billionaire head of tech company BASH, oversees a disastrous attempt to break up the comet and mine it for rare minerals. The launch is intercut with Randall, Kate, her new friend Yule (Timothée Chalamet) and Dr Oglethorpe returning to Michigan for a dinner with the Mindy family as they await the comet’s arrival.

Adam McKay: “The big difficulty with this sequence was that there’s a tonal shift going on — you’re coming out of this almost farcical comedy and reality is starting to emerge. We’re changing the tone of the movie and that was something I talked about a lot to the actors during filming.

“It was also difficult for our composer, Nicholas Britell. Like Hank, he had a difficult job on this movie, probably most of all for that sequence because he had to create this rich emotional music.

“The visual-effects work [on the BASH ships and the comet’s impact] was, once again, very tonally tricky. You wanted it to be sort of poppy — like a Marvel movie — but at the same time to be photorealistic. The BASH launch is a key sequence and it couldn’t feel fake — it had to have a power and force to it.

“I worked with Raymond [Gieringer, visual-effects supervisor] and Dione [Wood, visual-effects producer] in the same way I work with actors. I let them know they had carte blanche to throw ideas my way. My philosophy of directing is to get really good people in the building and let them bounce off each other. That whole ending sequence is a great example of it.”

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3 Lessons Leaders Can Learn From Watching the Netflix Film 'Don't Look Up' Although it may be a satirical sci-fi movie, it has important things to say about the way we lead.

By Lola Salvador Akinwunmi Edited by Amanda Breen Jan 19, 2022

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

In the star-studded satirical film Don't Look Up, astronomy professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his Ph.D. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) learn the hard way that leadership is not about titles or power, but about influence and, sometimes, greed.

After Mindy and Dibiasky discover a comet headed for a direct collision with Earth in six months, they take their findings to the highest office in the land, eventually meeting with Madam President Orlean (Meryl Streep). Distracted by tensions within her party, President Orlean dismisses the information, saying they'll "sit tight and assess" the situation. But then the White House changes its mind, eager to use the event to pull attention from the president's plunging poll ratings and re-election efforts.

Don't Look Up reveals what happens when leaders place their own interests above those of the people who have trusted them to lead. Naturally, there are some lessons business leaders can learn from watching the film — if you know where to find them.

Related: Why Servant Leadership is Becoming the Leadership Style of the Future

1. Selfishness stinks

President Orlean reveals her self-centered nature throughout the film, and her selfish decisions ultimately lead to the demise of her son and chief of staff Jason Orleans (Jonah Hill). Leadership plays a huge role in the success of an organization, and a selfish leader can hurt the bottom line. A selfish business leader is insecure and thinks that being called out on his or her less-than-noble motives is an attack on his or her creativity and ability to innovate — but that is so far from the truth.

It's no wonder selfishness didn't make it onto the list of most desirable leadership traits while trust, compassion, stability and hope held the top spots. Putting the customer and employee first results in satisfied customers and, ultimately, increased profits and loyal employees. Selfish leaders are primarily concerned with how others perceive them, and they tend to attract individuals who can't or won't challenge them. This enables them to make decisions that only benefit themselves.

2. Circle of influence matters

President Orlean was surrounded by a team of people-pleasers that wouldn't challenge her once she made up her mind based on half-truths. To succeed as a leader, it is important to surround yourself with individuals that you respect, trust, and with whom you can bounce around ideas. In business, a dishonest member of leadership's inner circle can bring shame and disaster to all, and entire organizations have collapsed as a result of such bad decisions.

Related: 3 Ways to Follow a Greedless Road to Success

Having and planning for an empowered circle of influence is a clear sign that you're a confident business leader who isn't threatened by others. This is also a sign of humility, a leadership trait that cultivates success. Humble leaders are surrounded by committed people. A leader that is willing to have a circle that fosters unity and respect will flourish, and that team will thrive even in times of crisis (such as that faced by the fictional White House).

3. Greed is destructive

Greed is destructive and is fueled by self-interest. Dictionary.com defines greed as "excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions." This was clearly demonstrated by President Orleans's 360-degree pivot from doing the right thing for the planet to calling off the mission when she realized she might profit from the comet's crash. Being motivated by greed is detrimental to an organization, as decisions are no longer based on objective or reasonable data.

The demise of Enron, once Wall Street's darling, reveals what greed can do to an organization and the economy. Leaders political or not have an obligation to do right by themselves and others without thinking of the profits. If a leader does not foster a mutually beneficial environment, it won't be long before the company starts to experience a decline, losing customers and shareholders alike.

Related: What's the Real Difference Between Leadership and Management?

Don't Look Up unpacks the trials and tribulations of ineffective leadership, demonstrating important, applicable lessons along the way. Whether we're talking about family dynamics in rural America or corporate takeovers at Fortune 500 companies, all leaders can benefit from the reminder to put others first, surround themselves with an honest inner circle and value people over profit.

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Don't Look Up

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Watch Don't Look Up with a subscription on Netflix.

What to Know

Don't Look Up aims too high for its scattershot barbs to consistently land, but Adam McKay's star-studded satire hits its target of collective denial square on.

Although it can be heavy-handed with its messaging, Don't Look Up tackles important subjects with humor and heart.

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Leonardo DiCaprio

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The Real Message of Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up”

Don’t Look Up, Don’t Look Up reviews, review of Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay news, Dr. Strangelove, climate change news, climate change, Leonardo DiCaprio news, Hollywood movies, Hollywood films, Peter Isackson

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Released just before Christmas on Netflix, Adam McKay ’s “ Don’t Look Up ” instantly became the most talked about movie of 2021. The professional film critics immediately weighed in, mostly with unfavorable reviews. By the following week, the reviews were being reviewed. “Don’t Look Up” had taken on the status of an event rather than a piece of entertainment or a work of art.

The reason for this curious phenomenon, similar to what occurred for the movie “ Bonnie and Clyde ” 55 years ago, lies in the fact that, while capturing the mood of an epoch focused on the very real possibility of the collapse of civilization, as a work of art, the movie is visibly flawed in a number of ways that no professional critic could ignore. Given McKay’s track record and the star power he brought together in the case, the critics felt that the film failed to live up to its advertised promise.

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When the viewership statistics began appearing, the disconnect between critical assessment and the public’s appreciation became flagrant. “ Don’t Look Up ” broke the record for Netflix viewership for a new release. The gap in judgment between the critics and the public itself became a topic for discussion in the media.

Some may see this as a demonstration of the inexorable loss of prestige of movie reviewers in the era of social media. Once respected pillars of popular journalism, most consumers now see cinema critics as irrelevant. This has something to do with the ambiguity of cinema itself. Traditionally consumed in a dark movie theater as a collective experience amid a responsive audience, most people now watch their movies at home on television. The distinction between movies and TV has become increasingly blurred.

Getting Talked About

No one doubts that audiences were drawn to the film principally through the appeal of the star-studded cast featuring, among others, Leonardo DiCaprio , Jennifer Lawrence , Meryl Streep , Ariana Grande and Cate Blanchett . But there may be another cultural factor that complements the roster of stars: the power of the traditional and non-traditional news media. That includes the uncountable bevy of pundits on social media. Commentary on the news has become another form of entertainment, thanks in part to its much lower production costs than Hollywood movies .

Once the critics had done their job, most outlets in the US treated the film’s release and reception as a news story in and of itself. The media began talking about the movie, no longer in terms of its artistic success or failure, but as a kind of psy-op designed to sensitize the public to the urgency of combating climate change . Anyone with access to Netflix felt obliged to watch it.

By becoming not only a much-viewed work of entertainment but more significantly an object of endless discussion in the media, the movie achieved the director’s real goal: getting talked about. The attention the media is still giving “Don’t Look Up,” weeks after its Netflix release, reveals more about the state of US culture than it does about the movie itself. It highlights the paradox, specifically targeted in the movie’s satire, of the public’s addiction to the media’s blather and its growing distrust of all institutions, including the very media to which the public is addicted.

Were the Critics Right?

In the case of “ Bonnie and Clyde ,” released in 1967, Newsweek’s Joe Morgenstern “initially panned [the movie], only to come back and proclaim it (wisely) a great movie,” according to David Ansen (a later Newsweek critic and a friend of mine). Morgenstern penned a second review celebrating Penn’s accomplishment. I’m not sure I agree with David about it being a great movie, but “ Bonnie and Clyde ” became such a popular success that Morgenstern had to sit down and rethink the cultural conditions that made it, if not a great movie, then at least a movie for its time. And what a time it was! 1967 is remembered as the year of the “summer of love,” a propitious moment for any cultural artifact that could be perceived as being “for its time.” More significantly, “ Bonnie and Clyde ” became a trend-setter for the next generation of filmmakers.

Can we compare our era with the ebullition of the sixties? Can “Don’t Look Up” pretend to be the “ Bonnie and Clyde ” of the 21 st century? Because of COVID-19 and Donald Trump, 2020 and 2021 may be remembered by future generations as two years as significant as 1967, 1968 (assassinations of MLK and RFK, “mai 68”) or 1969 (Woodstock). Then again, future generations may simply remember these two years as a period of gradual but certain decline marked by a debilitating indifference to the impending crisis that “Don’t Look Up” wants us to respond to.

McKay intended “Don’t Look Up” to be a satire. The mood of the movie is clearly satirical, but some critics noticed that the plot and characterization easily broke the mood, slipping dangerously at times into parody. True satire treats a serious subject seriously before introducing the elements of ironic perspective that subtly or unsubtly undermine the characters’ pretention of seriousness. For a director, this means controlling both the timing and the gap between the sober and the comic.

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Hollywood satire, which always employs humor, has traditionally fallen into two broad categories: dramatic and comic. The Marx Brothers were specialized in comic satire. It achieved its effects through immediate exaggeration of recognizable social behaviors, almost always including the relationship between a woman from the American upper class (Margaret Dumont), an upstart male gold digger (Groucho) and a penniless southern European immigrant trying to make it in WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) America (Chico).

In this Marxian (rather than Marxist) world, the three brothers in real life represented three different types of cultural marginality. Chico’s character comprised both Italians and Jews; the mute Harpo represented an extreme form of marginality, combining the handicapped and the poet (and natural musician). He even had his place in the poor black community (Harpo’s “ Who dat man? ” in “A Day at the Races”). All three of the Marx Brothers embodied, in contrasting ways, characters bent on destabilizing a self-satisfied majority that could neither understand them nor integrate them into their putative order. The very existence of the three non-conformists challenged the legitimacy of the institutions they interacted with.

Comic vs. Dramatic Satire

The Marx Brothers may have produced raucous comedy intended to provoke non-stop laughter, but their humor was built on a foundation of social satire. Audiences didn’t necessarily think about it in that way. They didn’t exit the movie theater reflecting deeply on the presumption, injustice and cluelessness of the ruling class. But the worlds and situations the Marx Brothers interacted with skewered a range of institutional targets: political and military (“ Duck Soup ”), academic (“Horsefeathers”), the arts (“A Night at the Opera”) or even medical (“A Day at the Races”). In so doing, they subtly altered the audience’s perception of the class system in the US and some of its most prestigious institutions. All of these movies appeared during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Like Jonathan Swift in “Gulliver’s Travels,” the Marx Brothers created parallel worlds, clearly differentiated from our own, in which recognizable social and transactional behavior became exaggerated to the point of producing immediate comic effects that highlighted the illogic and even injustice of the real world. Like the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy produced variants on the same principle of comic satire. Each created and gave life to distinctive marginal personalities, at odds with respectable society and usually defeated by it.

Dramatic satire has in common with comic satire the aim of making its points by producing laughter. But it follows a radically different set of rules. Instead of throwing absurdity straight in the face of the audience by staging wildly exaggerated behavior designed to challenge and upset the veneer of seriousness attributed to what is presented as “normal society,” dramatic satire first takes the time to create the audience’s belief in a realistic situation that will later be challenged by an unexpected event or external force. It turns around an anomaly that erupts to provoke reactions from a range of characters unprepared for the surprise.

In other words, dramatic satire gives deadpan seriousness a head start. It is the gap between the nature of the anomalous event and the quality of the characters’ reaction that produces what comes across not as the pretext for a joke, but as unintentional humor. In the history of cinema, the most perfect example of dramatic satire — and the most appropriate to compare with “Don’t Look Up” — is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, “ Dr. Strangelove ” or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb ,” the archetypal doomsday satire. McKay was acutely aware of that when he made “Don’t Look Up .”

Kubrick’s drama literally turns around the plot device of a Soviet “doomsday machine” that, if triggered, will destroy human life on the surface of the earth. The plot begins in total seriousness, like any dramatic movie. The key to its brilliance as satire is the gradual pace at which the exaggerated behavior of some of the characters unfolds. Playing their designated roles to the hilt, the politicians and generals become overtly comic when they go one step (and sometimes two or three) beyond what is reasonable.

There are several points in the first third of the movie where it becomes apparent to the viewer that they are watching a comedy. But this happens gradually and only through significant, but credible details in the dialogue, such as Brigadier General Ripper ’s obsession with “purity of essence.” As the plot develops, at key moments, the comedy can erupt at the highest level of absurdity, as when President Muffley interjects : “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room.” Such absurdly comic moments emerge logically, without ever undermining the fundamentally dramatic plot structure as it builds toward a final crescendo that will be followed by an instantaneous release.

Adam McKay’s Compromise

McKay’s script attempts to respect the same principle of dramatic satire as “ Dr. Strangelove .” The initial scenes reveal the introverted scientist (DiCaprio) and his research student (Lawrence) making the disquieting discovery of a comet certain to strike the earth within half a year. The impending catastrophe is fully confirmed before the audience can get a reasonable feeling for the characters. That is the movie’s first glaring flaw. The apparent tension seems unjustified. The audience doesn’t yet care enough about the characters to start seriously worrying about whether they or the earth they (and we) stand on will survive the comet’s assault.

A quick transition leads us to the corridors of the White House in Washington, DC. We spend some time with the troubled scientists who are kept waiting before meeting President Orlean ( Meryl Streep ). She turns out to be a clever composite of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. There’s even a gratuitous hint of a link to Barack Obama, the secret smoker.

The characters in “ Dr. Strangelove ” are each given the time to appear as reasonable, conscientious, professionally competent human beings. Their irrationality and moral failure only appear as they attempt to deal with the impending threat. In contrast, “Don’t Look Up’s” president and colleagues are simply the embodiments of the algorithm that now dominates US politics, aimed at winning elections. This is where the mood of the movie moves from satire to parody.

We then move to New York where a serious news bureau modeled after The New York Times and a daytime TV interview show demonstrate the same algorithmic principle predicated this time essentially on optimizing ratings. At this point, the spectacle of increasingly trivial behavior by all the establishment parties definitively takes over.

What follows is a dynamically edited series of acts and scenes that riff on the gap between the serious intentions of the scientists and the endless venality and psychological triviality of politicians, entertainers and techno-capitalists. The specific critique of institutions and the media is usually on target. But it too often appears to be an exercise of making fun of what is visible every day in our media simply by duplicating its most consistent behaviors.

The Difficulty of Satirizing Hyperreality

In other words, McKay’s parody suffers from the already hyperreal nature of what it seeks to critique. The culture it puts on display, already accessible in today’s media, is too recognizable and predictable, in a certain sense, too true to (hyperreal) life. It may be a thankless task to try for comic effect by further exaggerating anything in the real world that is already so exaggerated in its triviality and cynical efficiency that on its own it tends to be laughable. McKay ends up faithfully reproducing a world that, through its media, endlessly parodies itself.

That may be what made the critics feel uncomfortable. The actors do their best to parody what it already a parody. The movie rarely achieves the sense of queasy discomfort satire normally seeks to inspire. “ Dr. Strangelove ” does so by slowly building that discomfort to a fever pitch. Kubrick shows his characters thinking, strategizing, trying to adapt to an unusual situation. McKay’s characters too often appear to be reading from a script. We never get the impression that they are grappling with anything. Instead, they are playing out their algorithmically determined roles.

Perhaps the real lesson, worth being talked about, from “Don’t Look Up” is that in a world so dominated by the hyperreality projected not just by our media but also by our politicians, technology gurus and even academics, true satire is no longer possible. When the media reaches the level of superficiality and sheer venality that it has achieved today, as revealed in every scene of “Don’t Look Up,” the link to reality in today’s culture is too tenuous for effective political satire to be produced.

Hollywood Satire and Contemporary History

Over the past century, Hollywood has produced many successful and indeed unforgettable satires. They fall into a variety of styles and with a wide range of comic techniques. “ Duck Soup ” (Marx Brothers), “Blazing Saddles” (Mel Brooks), “M*A*S*H”(Robert Altman), “Mulholland Drive” (David Lynch) and many others stand as great Hollywood satires that achieved their effect by creating largely unbelievable frameworks that become believable by virtue of the director’s control of exaggeration, coupled with the capacity to build a coherent intricacy of contrasts and conflicts in the plotting.

“Don’t Look Up” never quite makes up its mind about whether it wishes to embrace “ Dr. Strangelove ’s” focused drama or the liberated wackiness of Mel Brooks. That may be why the critics found it to be an unsatisfying hybrid. In its defense, however, we should recognize — and future generations should note — that it does stand as an effective parody of the most predictable behavior of public figures incapable of responding to an existential crisis because they have been programmed according to a different set of algorithmic rules. For that reason, the film should be considered a resounding success. It has raised in the public forum the most troubling question concerning the climate crisis: that even our awareness of it cannot serve to find a solution. The system we are trying to save is built to resist anyone’s saving it.

For all its cinematic quality, brilliant humor and critical success, “ Dr. Strangelove ” had no immediate impact on the arms race. Still, it is worth noting that when Ronald Reagan was elected president, sixteen years after the movie’s release, as he was making the rounds of the federal government’s installations , upon visiting the Pentagon he “asked the chief of staff to show him the war room of Dr. Strangelove .” The Hollywood actor, who had spent plenty of time in his earlier career in sound studios, believed Kubrick’s set was real.

Reagan’s public anti-communist philosophy was not radically different from Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper ’s as detailed in “ Dr. Strangelove .” The man who, before his election, “had argued that the United States was falling behind the Soviets in the nuclear competition” personally initiated the negotiations that led to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty ( START ), “the first treaty that required U.S . and Soviet/Russian reductions of strategic nuclear weapons.” Could it have been Reagan’s memory of the lessons of “ Dr. Strangelove ” that ultimately guided him towards that decision?

A Tale of Two Cold Wars

The original Cold War nuclear arms race Kubrick denounced in his movie is still going on to this day. Perhaps more than ever it can be triggered in a heartbeat. In contrast, climate change promises a slow agony, whose groans may already be discernible. America’s current president, Joe Biden, says he wants to rein it in but seems incapable of exercising any real leadership to achieve that goal.

At the time Kubrick was shooting “ Dr. Strangelove ,” John F. Kennedy was still president. In his first year of office, JFK called for the abolition of nuclear weapons “before they abolish us.” In the summer of 1963, he initiated the first nuclear test ban treaty . Four months later, he was successfully “abolished” himself in the streets of Dallas.

It appears clear now that, willingly or unwillingly, President Biden will accomplish little to limit the effects of climate change . Seeking to raise the stakes of the US rivalry with China and increasing the pressure on Russia over Ukraine in a spirit that sometimes resembles a new cold war, he has also made it abundantly clear that he has no intention of banishing nuclear weapons. In the first week of 2022, the White House affirmed the principle that “nuclear weapons—for as long as they continue to exist—should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression, and prevent war.”

The first cold war ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. The lesson of “ Dr. Strangelove ” no longer lives in any president’s memory. But can we suppose or perhaps even hope that a future president who happened to watch “Don’t Look Up” at the end of 2021 will, like Reagan, remember its message and dare, even decades later, to take some kind of serious action to address it? That seems unlikely. As President Orlean pointed out, unless the end of the world is scheduled to take place before the next presidential or midterm election, there are more important things to attend to.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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January 6, 2022. The film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, tells the story of the discovery of an apocalyptic comet that's heading for Earth. Photograph by Niko Tavernise ...
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3 Lessons Leaders Can Learn From Watching the Netflix Film 'Don't Look Up' Although it may be a satirical sci-fi movie, it has important things to say about the way we lead.

1. Selfishness stinks

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