Review: Don't Look Up (2021)

 Don't Look Up (2021)

Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content

Score: 4 out of 5

Don't Look Up is a movie that wants to be Dr. Strangelove for global warming, and whether or not it pulls it off depends on your tolerance for very heavy-handed satire. Adam McKay, the film's director and co-writer (together with former Bernie Sanders speechwriter/advisor David Sirota -- i.e. a man literally paid to write stump speeches for a politician) who had previously made The Big Short and a whole bunch of 2000s Will Ferrell comedies, wasn't shy about the movie he was making. He said point-blank that he went out of his way to write the most heavy-handed, blunt-force metaphor for global warming he could possibly think of, a comet destroying Earth that we have the ability to deflect but for some reason aren't, and the result is a pure sadist show filled with unlikable people who you're waiting to see receive their comeuppance, while the only ones who get anything resembling a happy ending are the beleaguered scientists and bureaucrats who serve as mouthpieces for the writers.

I felt it more or less succeeded at doing that, but I also felt that it, almost accidentally, stumbled into something I've rarely seen: a Lovecraftian comedy, specifically one that still goes all-in on his brand of cosmic horror rather than soften it. The central conceit of many of H. P. Lovecraft's stories, that of humanity being small and meaningless in the grand scheme of a universe far bigger than them that doesn't care about any of their puny accomplishments, is one that's usually played for horror, most notably by Lovecraft himself and the many artists influenced by him. When that kind of material is given a lighthearted touch, it's usually in the context of stories that borrow the aesthetics of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (doomsday cults, grotesquely visceral monsters with lots of tentacles, alien gods with unpronounceable names) but give humanity the chance to effectively fight back. This movie takes the opposite track. It's a movie about a comet that's coming to hit Earth and destroy everything. It doesn't give a flying fuck about any of us; it's a comet, an inanimate ball of rock and ice randomly drifting through our solar system that just so happens to be on a collision course with Earth. The protagonists, the graduate student Kate Dibiasky who discovers the comet and her astronomy professor Dr. Randall Mindy who does the numbers and realizes that it's going to impact Earth, are framed as the kind of heroes Lovecraft would write, people who slowly but surely go mad from the revelation of just how meaningless their existence is in the face of looming extinction. In fact, the basic premise is not unlike that of Junji Ito's manga Remina, which plays a very similar scenario for some truly fucked-up horror, complete with both stories having satire of celebrity culture as a running theme.

But this movie takes that premise and, instead of using it to try and scare the viewer, uses it to mine the darkest possible laughs it can think of. Kate's breakdown on a talk show as she tries to warn the world about the comet goes memetic and is treated like Britney Spears' meltdown in the late '00s. Dr. Mindy's reaction is to dive head-first into wine, women, and song, exploiting his new status as a rock star scientist to have an affair with a morning show host and bask in the fame and adulation of the world because he knows, deep down, that anything else is pointless and he may as well enjoy his last few months on Earth. And most importantly, the film's main satirical thrust is that humanity probably does have the ability to deflect the comet and save itself, but is just too goddamn stupid and greedy to do so. The President is a vain, corrupt, bullying, media-obsessed idiot whose administration is rife with nepotism, cronyism, and graft (guess who was President when this movie was written), the "visionary geniuses" of the tech industry are more concerned with a mix of pie-in-the-sky utopianism and getting rich than in the actual, practical, day-to-day problems that most people face, and the media is chiefly concerned with celebrity gossip and other frivolous stories and buries serious issues that might hurt their ratings. Humanity as a whole doesn't go mad from the revelation of the comet, at least not at first, but that's because, as far as this movie is concerned, we're already living in a world gone mad.

These two angles -- McKay and Sirota's intended one of a satire of the world's (lack of) response to global warming, and a film that takes a lot of the tropes of cosmic horror and plays them for comedy -- feed into each other and produce a pitch-black satire reminiscent of an Armando Iannucci story, a good episode of South Park, or the background worldbuilding of a Grand Theft Auto game. This movie ain't subtle. The comet is a plain-as-day metaphor for the climate crisis that practically screams the message into your face, most notably when Dr. Mindy goes on a furious rant on a talk show that, barring the specific subject matter of the comet, may as well have come from the unshackled id of any climate scientist, meteorologist, or environmentalist who decided to one day say "fuck it" and let everyone know what they really think of all the bullshit they have to put up with. The entire 138-minute runtime of this movie is an escalating exercise in cringe comedy as Dr. Mindy, Kate, and the underpaid civil servants and bureaucrats who take them and the crisis seriously find themselves stonewalled, tripped up, and belittled by the vapid, selfish, ignorant dumbasses who actually run the show. Its sense of humor is mean-spirited and often insulting, but it saves its bile for very specific and deserving targets while still affording enough humanity to its protagonists to make me actually care about them, especially as the film rolls towards its conclusion.

Make no mistake, though, this is a very funny metaphor for global warming, much of it sold by an excellent all-star cast. Meryl Streep plays President Janie Orlean as a combination of every terrible thing that's ever been said about Donald Trump and every terrible thing that's ever been said about Hillary Clinton (again, you can tell that a Bernie Sanders advisor co-wrote this), the kind of mediagenic, charismatic politician who looks good in front of the cameras but whose administration is a pit of slime. Streep is clearly relishing the chance to play someone who'd be an unrepentant villain if not for the fact that she's also a complete fucking moron. Mark Rylance plays the President's partner-in-crime Peter Isherwell as a mix of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs who gives off the sense that he's not just a greedy robber baron but someone who genuinely seems to believe his own bullshit, that his sci-fi scheme to save the day would not only work but elevate human civilization into a utopian golden age, and that he's spent too long marinating in the stew of hare-brained Silicon Valley techno-dreamers to think about any practical problems. Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as the talk show hosts Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer are playing clear parodies of Kelly Ripa and Al Roker, and perfectly capture everything obnoxious and saccharine about morning talk shows and daytime news. The supporting cast is a non-stop parade of both rising stars and "hey, it's that guy!" actors, including Jonah Hill as Janie's Jared Kushner-esque son/Chief of Staff who serves as a symbol of the White House's corruption, Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi as a pair of pop stars putting on a benefit concert who contribute a hilarious song to the soundtrack, Ron Perlman as a war hero with a few screws loose who leads the initial mission to try and deflect the comet, and Timothée Chalamet as a punkish slacker whose response to the comet is to get right with God. Finally Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Rob Morgan get the "straight man" roles as Dr. Mindy, Kate, and the government scientist Dr. Oglethorpe, all of them offering up welcome reminders of why they're all considered some of the best actors of their respective generations (and, in Lawrence's case, reminding us why she was an A-lister before she did Passengers) as they have to navigate the sick, sad world around them in their long-shot effort to save it. Even here, though, they're not immune from the film's satirical barbs, each of them (especially Dr. Mindy) shown to not quite be as above-it-all as they assume they are.

The Bottom Line

It's so in-your-face with its politics and message that it risks feeling insufferable even if you agree with it. But me? I found it to be a hilarious, pitch-black, and frequently on-point satire that pulls no punches and manages to somehow combine big laughs with existential dread. I recommend giving it a watch.