Movie Review: ‘Don’t Look Up’ –

By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Some streaming movie fans are reeling away from the outrageous silliness of one of the top watched films on Netflix this year, “Don’t Look Up.”

It’s an American satirical science fiction film written, directed and produced by Adam McKay, another in a long line of apocalyptic doomsday films in recent years.

McKay is already known for “Vice” about George W. Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney, and “The Big Short,” about the financial meltdown, the Great Recession and Bush and Obama bank bailouts.

Even I had skimmed past this film pitch myself after watching the short synopsis on Netflix, until last night, when it beckoned as the best option at the time — when I didn’t feel like scrolling down further to find something else for my nightly visual and visceral break and escape.

When I saw Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Michigan State University astronomy Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky, discover a comet using the Subaru Telescope, however, and then her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), put together the calculations showing that the large comet was headed for a direct hit on Earth in about six months, I was hooked.

It doesn’t take long to figure out what McKay is up to. He uses the immediate, direct threat of a planet killing comet as something you eventually see with your own eyes to represent the more long term, indirect threat we face from global warming and climate change, which is much harder for people to see.

Even when people these days are on the run from an out of control wildfire or survive high winds and floods from a killer hurricane, they will often deny the reality that climate change is making those things more frequent and powerful.

In a series of outrageous and sometimes comic events, McKay shows a very close to reality show depicting how our modern media and social media systems, damaged belief system and divided political system, our democracy in disarray, may in fact doom the future of human survival on planet Earth. It’s a subject I’ve only been writing about for the past 32 years.

In these times, it’s unclear even if people were to see the damn comet with their own eyes — or watch a loved one die of Covid — if they would believe the science of the threat right in front of them. While humans were confused about such things before Facebook and Trump came along, this film captures just how confused and chaotic things have become.

When the news of the life-threatening comet makes it’s way up to NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, apparently a real thing, the director Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (played by Rob Morgan) ushers them onto a military transport plane to Washington, D.C., where they end up waiting to see the president in the Oval Office of the White House for hours (and having to pay for snacks and water while they wait).

President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), a cross between Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, at first makes fun of the threat and the science, until the group breaks national security and leaks the story to The New York Herald and on an outrageous celebrity television talk show that could be on Fox, or any of the national networks or cable TV shows these days.

The media frenzy causes the president to pretend to take the threat seriously, distracting her from a controversial appointment to the Supreme Court and the next election.

When the administration’s own NASA scientists internally confirm the comet trajectory, even the president’s son Jason Orlean, the White House chief of staff (played by Jonah Hill), must admit the threat is real. In a performance which obviously reminds one of Trump’s kids and their oversized role in government and the blatant unethical nepotism of the Trump administration, which apparently never offends his loyal following of would be patriotic American do gooders (MAGA), Hill’s character gets the last hilarious word in the film.

I won’t spoil the ending for you.

Ultimately those who believe the comet are real form a coalition urging people to “Look Up.”

Lawrence’s character becomes hated on social media for trying to tell people the truth, but DiCaprio’s character becomes a famous scientist on TV like Anthony Fauci, until he finally loses it and joins the “Look Up” coalition as a spokesman.

In an effort to get reelected by “the working people,” the president’s people form a “Don’t Look Up” coalition, and hire a social media company to attempt to save the planet and try to profit from the minerals in the comet. They ultimately turn around the U.S. military plan to blow up the comet with a suicide mission bringing back one of the space shuttles from mothballs and arming it with nuclear warheads.

At this point in the film, having not read any of the reviews in advance, I thought to myself: There is no way they are going to find a way to deliver a Hollywood happy ending in this thing.

But again, I don’t want to spoil it for you.

British actor Mark Rylance plays Sir Peter Isherwell, a tech billionaire CEO of BASH and another one of Orlean’s top political contributors, who appears as a cross between Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

There is some nudity and sex in the film, which seems apropos of our times, along with heavy consumption of alcohol and prescription drug use. DiCaprio is a pill popping Xanax freek, while Streep’s character chain smokes cigarettes, which gives her a three point bump in the polls.

You even get to see Meryl Streep nude from behind in the end — on an exoplanet populated by human-eating dinosaurs. But perhaps that’s revealing too much.

The film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the cast but found McKay’s approach to the subject somewhat “heavy handed” or even “silly.”

In spite of the critical reviews, it was named one of the top ten films of 2021 by the National Board of Review and American Film Institute. It received four nominations at the 79th Golden Globe Awards, including Best Picture – Musical or Comedy, and six nominations at the 27th Critics’ Choice Awards, including for Best Picture.

I don’t know whether to recommend the movie because it is funny — it is in a scary kind of way — or because it so nearly depicts our reality. But if you are serious about keeping up with how film depicts our reality, I don’t see how you can skip this one.

While I’ve written in great depth about the communications problem we face if we are to save some semblance of democracy and keep life livable for humans on planet Earth, this film depicts how our existential anxiety could lead to our worst fears becoming reality.

In the end, there’s only one thing to say about it.

Whatever you do, “Look up.”

Clearly, if things keep going the way they are going, you might say, “We are doomed. We’re all going to die.”

Most Memorable Quote

“If we can’t all agree at the bare minimum that a giant comet the size of Mt. Everest hurtling its way toward planet Earth is not a fucking good thing,” DiCaprio cries, his voice cracking, “then what the hell happened to us? I mean, my God, how do we even talk to each other? What have we done to ourselves? How do we fix it?”

Don’t Look Up: the first good movie about climate change

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