Didja hear that the climate is changing and our politicians are all pretty much clowns that aren’t doing a thing to stop it? It’s true, and if you’re the type of person who Don’t Look Up is made for, you’re probably already aware. Your retirement plans most likely consist of looking for beachfront property in Nevada. Unless you’ve been living under an increasingly hot rock, Don’t Look Up doesn’t have much to say to you. It’s definitely not for the conservative crowd and preaching to the already-nodding-along liberal choir seems pointless.
The basic premise of the film, a catastrophe from space in the form of a meteor (here subbed in clunky fashion for climate change) headed straight at us is brought to the public eye by TV bimbos (the lady anchor a secret genius) and exacerbated to world-ending crisis by an inept government, is almost beat-for-beat exactly the same as Mars Attacks! (including the secretly smart female reporter) but far less funny, pithy, or brutal in its satirical aims.
Seriously. Rewatch Mars Attacks! and tell me it’s not a perfect skewering of the times we live in with the addition of goofy, murderous Martians and featuring a delightful Danny Elfman theremin soundtrack to boot. Don’t Look Up is as dry as a rejected New Yorker cartoon caption but thinks it’s the gnarliest observational comedy George Carlin only ever wished he wrote.
Don’t Look Up is mediocre, medium, average—saying this now because, unlike the feels of the Twitterati, it’s not the worst thing ever made—mainly because when you front load even a middling piece with that much Academy Award-winning prime beef, elevating the material is pretty much guaranteed. Mid-level writing aside, though, it’s not funny, which is like making a cake that’s not sweet. Satire, of the type that people like Jonathan Swift made famous, is supposed to take a gander at society and extrapolate a long, darkly humorous look at the most extreme example of the logical endpoint. Almost everyone who’s taken an English class in school learned about Swift’s A Modest Proposal, inspired by the way the Brits were keeping the (mostly Catholic) Irish in abject poverty, with him suggesting the Irish fatten up their excess tykes and sell them to the aristos for a nosh. Closer to today, we have films like Dr. Strangelove that looked at the crazed panic surrounding the Cold War mentality that had taken over America, a sort of normalized insanity that saw a cartoon turtle teaching kids via song to duck and cover under their desks if an atomic bomb fell (they apparently had a lot of faith in asbestos in those heady, pre-Mesothelioma days). Others, like The President’s Analyst, took on both spy paranoia and how the CIA and KGB were brothers under the skin. The ‘70s saw Network famously ripping apart the trends TV was headed toward years before Jerry Springer or CNN or FOX News were even specks in the apple of a marketer’s eye, Howard Beale (Peter Finch) famously pulling at his hair and yelling about how bad things were getting.
Don’t Look Up, for all it tries to do, takes chunks from those movies whereas they didn’t from each other. The insanity of the government is pure Strangelove and at one point Leonardo DiCaprio, playing astrophysicist Dr. Randall Mindy, gives an impassioned Network-style speech on TV, face-reddening and spit-flying as he tries to match the intensity Peter Finch won an Oscar for. Don’t Look Up, for all it wants to try to say, is both trite and derivative; it doesn’t just take inspiration from its betters, it actively lifts moments and puts them into its story and then tries to stand there, hand on its hips, proudly demanding kudos. This isn’t to say that films can’t borrow from each other. Any film buff knows about De Palma putting the baby stroller bit from war movie Battleship Potemkin into a train station gun battle in gangster-classic The Untouchables because he recontextualized it, comparing war with fighting crime. Network was a movie looking at its current world with a scene of a person driven to madness having a breakdown on TV and Don’t Look Up just does the exact same thing to the exact same purpose. No reimagining, no recontextualizing, just straight excising it from its predecessor and plopping it in.
Perhaps the worst thing is that when the film could’ve reached and been a little original, the moments are squandered. The ending, as a perfect example, sees the elderly uber-wealthy flee Earth in the billionaire techie’s (Mark Rylance) When Worlds Collide-style escape shuttle, fly through the remains of our now-destroyed planet and then the cosmos for another 22,000 years, landing on a far distant paradise only to get immediately eaten by space-dinos. Comedy could’ve been mined from having them realize they’re all incapable of providing medical care, building even rudimentary shelter, doing any sort of farming—that and the fact they’re all far too old to be new Adams and Eves in terms of populating their new Eden—but no. Space-dinos. It’s a punchline without a joke, a weak sub-Family Guy random grasp at shock mistaken for humor. Having the fleeing landlords crash into the meteor and send it off course isn’t even a possibility in the world that’s been established.
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Don’t Look Up is Idiocracy if that film, whatever anyone may think of it now, didn’t have the comedic mind and heart of Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, and perhaps the best modern workplace comedy of all-time, Office Space) behind it. It’s a threadbare South Park imitation without the pure crudeness that drove the best moments of that show.
It’s also hopeless. Bleak. Not that the times we are living in aren’t awful—government gridlock with fascists on one side and do-nothings on the other, promised dates for finally attempting to mitigate climate change scheduled for years or decades past the sell-bys scientists already set as last resorts—but it’s just plain bleak in its outlook on humanity. Ebenezer Scrooge thought better of people than Don’t Look Up does. Forget Jonah Hill’s White House presser, Meryl Streep’s prez (a Hillary Clinton/Donald Trump combo), or Cate Blanchett’s nasty Megyn Kelly-meets-Mika Brzezinski TV doyenne—they’re supposed to be inept and horrible. Look at the heroes, the ones we’re asked to root for. Jennifer Lawrence plays Kate Dibiasky, a scientist whose running gag in the film is everyone thinking she’s a shrill bummer for no other reason than it’s just written that characters respond to her that way (though coming from writer Dave Sirota who pretty much ran Bernie Sanders’ campaign on Hillary being shrill and unlikeable, it’s definitely within his wheelhouse). About the only saving grace regarding Lawrence is her too-brief fling with a youth played by Timothée Chalamet, one of the few times she’s had a romance onscreen with someone her age outside the Hunger Games series. DiCaprio’s Mindy cheats on his wife (Melanie Lynskey) of decades with Blanchett’s reporter simply because he’s a weak man enchanted by getting his mug on the idiot-box a few too many times. It’s something that makes his about-face Howard Beale come-to-Jesus moment ring false and feel more like another heel-turn rather than anything heroic.
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He’s not a lone voice crying out in the wilderness, he’s just a boob who can’t make up his mind whose bed it is he ultimately wants to warm.
Adam McKay, the director, and Sirota both took to Twitter, as audiences gobbled it up (mostly, I’d guess, based on the cast being almost wall-to-wall Oscar winners) and critics savaged it, to throw fits and imply that anyone who didn’t like the movie wasn’t aware of climate change, or worse. But all their millionaire manbaby excoriating and finger-wagging aside, it boils down to Don’t Look Up being only pretty good. Don’t Look Up functions, but it’s far from great. But what truly hurts it is the attitude behind it.
As much as McKay and Sirota want to pretend it’s a demand to wake up, an alarm, a call to action, Don’t Look Up is really one of the most miserly pieces on just how godawful humanity really is ever filmed. Almost every character in the film is some shade of unlikeable (or we’re repeatedly told Lawrence is unlikeable). By the time the meteor comes to kill us all, you’re sitting at home rooting for the characters to die. There’s no Capra-esque heart to this film, no Mr. Smith in this Washington or George Bailey in this Bedford Falls. There’s no notion that one person, no matter how hard the struggle or how great the odds, can at least try to make a difference—in the world of Don’t Look Up there’s only Mr. Potters and Senator Paines and if you’re looking for Jimmy Stewart, he’s off somewhere having an affair on Donna Reed. If this is how the creators really view the world, if they have this level of contempt for everybody, what’s to save? Let the meteor (or climate change) come and the chips fall where they may.
Watch Mars Attacks! instead—you’ll at least get a laugh out of the end of the world. In other words, unless you’re just desperately curious, don’t look up Don’t Look Up.
