DON'T LOOK UP: Dope Impact

Director: Adam McKay
Writers: Adam McKay, David Sirota
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande
Runtime: 138 mins.
2021

Dr. Strangelove, Sorry to Bother You, Melancholia: the much better apocalyptic satires that I was reminded of during this film. Do the Right Thing, Catch-22, First Reformed. I found solace in dwelling on the sharpness of these stories, their visual splendor, their human insights, and their gall. Don't Look Up has none of that. This is a Netflix film, which means it is algorithmically gestated to remind us of other, better movies. A thin veneer of style stretched over a boomer facebook screed about how kids are too much in their phones to Get Out the Vote. This is not satire, it is a lecture.

For this is a movie about the Bang at the end of the world, a massive meteor that nobody seems to want to take seriously. Our guides on this journey of misanthropy are PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). Their quest takes us from the observatory, to the White House, to yammering daytime talk shows, to oblivion. As they try to spread the word that the Earth has six months to live, the airwaves crowd them out with news of celebrity gossip and political scandal.

This is the kind of movie that thinks the height of comedy is revealing that the president of the United States (Meryl Streep) has sexted her vagina to somebody. This is the kind of movie that still thinks jokes about diet culture are cutting edge. This is the kind of movie that interrupts televised celebrity drama with a placeholder character who intones that their phone just automatically bought that celebrity's new single, and oh would you look at that, it did it again.

I single out this last moment because it's where comedy goes to die. There's a famous chestnut: "Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target lest it be mistaken for and contribute to that which it intends to criticize." Don't Look Up has clarity of intent, I suppose, though I would argue that it is lazy about figuring out exactly what it's criticizing beyond the stupidity of individuals. What it lacks is creativity. Insight. Director Adam McKay was once responsible for distinctive comedy features like Anchorman, but has apparently learned all the wrong lessons from his success with The Big Short. Now he mostly moralizes to people who already agree with him. Don't Look Up is no better than awards-bait movies about race that are designed to make old white liberal people feel good about themselves for not being as racist as they could be. These movies let their audience off the hook, then their audience turns around to actively reinforce the cycles of systemic oppression that they pretend to oppose.

This is a story told from a position of superiority, anchored in the righteous anger of Kate. The scientists are simply, objectively right, and they are surrounded by a world of idiots. This is the laziest political stance imaginable. Smug doesn't even begin to cover it. It is not structural critique, it is mutual masturbation. This is the Sunday political cartoon of films, never interested in grappling with anything difficult, always totally assured of having the right answers.

Disliking the thematic approach of a movie is not enough to damn it, but the craftsmanship is all out of whack too. The dialogue is tiresome and moralizing. The editing is a total mess, weirdly lugubrious at times, and frenetic at others for the sake of ineffective ironic juxtaposition. The ensemble cast, one of the best of the year, is entirely at a loss for how to salvage the material. What character arcs present themselves seem basically arbitrary. Why would Kate just give up on her cause? Why does the supremely anxious yet well-intentioned Dr. Mindy take sides with the government and have a messy affair? So many limp appendages could have been shaved off this movie, yet all of it is mashed into the bloated runtime presumably because McKay wanted to hit every single bullet point on his laundry list of didactic gotchas.

When I watch Ariana Grande's sub-SNL quality self-parody, I can't help but think of the deep cultural insights and absurdities of Bojack Horseman. When I see Jonah Hill's character toss bags of snacks at White House guests in an eye-rolling display of cruel apathy, I can't help but think of the Dr. Strangelove soldier's insistence that Captain Mandrake will have to answer to the Coca-Cola company for the change he steals to make a world-saving phone call. When I sit through DiCaprio's manic twitchiness that's meant to show how much he cares, I can't help but think of the pathetic, dogged determination of the pastor in First Reformed to rally others to take action against the oncoming hellscape.

Don't Look Up is toothless. This could have been a movie about humanity's capacity for self-destruction, or the predatory power structures that benefit from collective befuddlement. With a little more shading and insight, we could have been invested in these characters' bleak fate. The world could have ended and cut to black, leaving us to ponder the finality of apocalypse. Instead we get more jokey crap about consumerist debris floating through space, and a lowest common denominator bit in which Jonah Hill is alone on Earth still posting to social media. The film may be aware of the Issues That We Face Today, but it only features a surface understanding of the What. It cannot touch the great gaping abyss of Why that lies beyond that surface.

0.5 / 5  BLOBS