Review: Don't Look Up (2021)

It’s a dire time for satire. The presidency of Donald Trump effectively made political satire redundant, while otherwise intelligent and thoughtful artists started to think that the purpose of satire was to offer moral correctives for the culture at large. This is wrong-headed thinking and profoundly non-satirical. The purpose of satire is to bludgeon and expose the foolishness of its target through exaggeration, caricature, and ruthless inspection. It does not seek to demonstrate an answer, only to point out a problem. In this respect, Adam McKay’s new Netflix satire, Don’t Look Up, certainly fits the bill as satire. But it’s about as effective at satire as a Twitter meme.

The film is toothless and condescending, but not in the way the much ballyhooed online discourse has labelled it as. The problem is not that it is detached from a clear political project—good satire is rarely proscriptive—nor is it that it targets the neoliberal institutions that keep society largely functioning—these institutions are worthy of much scorn. It’s that it’s too long, too obvious, and much too preoccupied with the notion that there are some rational people who could solve whatever ails society as long as we listen to them. It creates an exaggerated scenario filled with absurd characters, but then puts two reasonable people at its centre. It genuinely believes there are good guys and bad guys in its storyworld, and that’s a big problem in satire, which is supposed to be ruthless in exposing the flaws of all its characters.

Don’t Look Up has a star-studded cast bring to life its absurd (though not as absurd as it imagines) plot concerning an impending apocalypse. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are astronomers who discover a comet hurtling towards Earth. The problem is that every person in power they tell about the oncoming comet—whether the President of the United States (Meryl Streep) or America’s most popular daytime talk show duo (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry)—doesn’t take the problem seriously. It’s an obvious metaphor for the oncoming climate disaster; scientists have identified a problem and those in charge have no motivation to act to avoid the impact.

The film starts promisingly, but soon hits a rut. After recognizing the oncoming comet and knowing the math shows a greater-than-99% chance of the comet hitting the Earth, DiCaprio’s Dr. Randall Mindy and Lawrence’s PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky meet with the President and her obnoxious chief of staff (Jonah Hill). The President pretends to care, but essentially laughs off the assertion that life on the planet is going to be destroyed. They choose to “Sit tight and assess”—in other words, do nothing.

The scene captures exactly what Don’t Look Up is going for with its satire. It channels our frustration at our real world political leaders into an absurd scenario where the President seems hardly capable of holding eye contact, the chief of staff is an irritating little weasel who’s more fixated on the footwear of a scientist than her words, and the reassurances of those in power are nothing but mealy-mouth empty phrases and lies about their own good faith. It’s frustrating, amusing, and all too recognizable.

Problem is, this scene is essentially repeated throughout the unforgivable 138-minute runtime of the film, with little deviation. Some credit is due to editor Hank Corwin for jumping between all the different threads without making the film incomprehensible, but it never generates the kind of tension you’d expect of a film with a ticking time bomb premise. 

There are further exaggerations added to the scenario, such as the rising prominence of Mark Rylance’s tech guru, who plays like a mix between Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and promises a world free of discomfort through his technological innovations. There are escalations in the threat, such as when a demolition mission is called off in favour of a plan to mine the comet for its rare minerals. There are absurd characters spouting ridiculous dialogue, such as Ron Perlman’s old-school colonel who is tasked with destroying the comet. But the dramatic set-up in every scene is the same—good scientists try to tell the truth, everyone else ignores them, scientists yell at them for being so dumb. There are simple variations on satirical targets, switching between government, social media, daytime news, political division, etc, but the actual satirical approach is one-note. Worst of all is that the film isn’t particularly funny. It’s amusing, but you won’t find the big belly laughs of McKay’s earlier work with Will Ferrell, or even the formal audacity of The Big Short.

Again, this is not to say that Don’t Look Up is not satire. It’s simply a bad one. It has all the hallmarks of satire. There is exaggeration, as the film borrows its premise from one of the most absurd action movies of all time, Michael Bay’s Armageddon. There are caricatures and grotesque portraits of real world figures. Essentially every character aside from Dr. Mindy, Kate, and Rob Morgan’s Dr. Oglethorpe are cartoon characters, with fake smiles, oblivious comments, and an inflated sense of security and self importance. But that’s the problem. Dr. Mindy and Kate are presented as reasonable people with the obvious good interest of the world at heart. They are essentially normal people inserted into an absurdist scenario and only rarely the objects of the film’s satire. (To be fair, there is a nice bit about Dr. Mindy getting madeover during his press tour and becoming a culture icon as the “sexy astronomer.”)

But in every situation, Dr. Mindy and Kate are presented as reasonable people with an obvious solution and since the film is so adamant about its operation as a metaphor for our current political climate, it makes Mindy and Kate stand-ins for real life scientists, and thus, essentially removes them from the satirical equation. It’s advertised as biting satire, but ends up being about as bold as the “trust the science” posts that flood social media in liberal circles. It’s so reductive in its solution: scientists are good and we have to blindly trust them, institutions and politicians and media are bad—except for, of course, scientific institutions, but that would complicate the simple dynamic.

The worst comes in the end, when the characters exhaust what they think are their options and submit to a pollyannaish “we’re all in this together” pablum that is about feeling the right way and being outraged about the correct things, but not doing anything about it aside from complaining into the void.

To be clear, I don’t want a satire to adhere to rigorous real-world logic. But a film of this kind should exhaust the possibilities of its own scenario and amplify the ridiculousness right to its breaking point. Don’t Look Up simply repeats, but doesn’t amplify, and then it grows tired of being angry, so it settles into a sentimental respite about how there are some good people out there who should cling to each other in times of hardship. But to come back around to a blandly emotionalist message—politics is doomed so people should just put their heads in the sand and love one another—in the final minutes of a film that is meant to be ruthless shows how toothless the film really is. Clearly, it’s hard to effectively satirize a media culture that you’re a part of, as Don’t Look Up is as liberal and myopic as the culture it claims to abhor.

4 out of 10

Don’t Look Up (2021, USA)

Directed by Adam McKay; written by Adam McKay, based on a story by McKay and David Sirota; starring Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi, Himseh Patel, Melanie Lynskey, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep.

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