*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Ryan Coleman’s review here.*
Planetary destruction is imminent. We are moments away from an irreversible disaster that will render the world inhospitable to human existence. We probably have the tools to combat our extinction, but we neglect to use them because the structural changes that can ensure the long-term preservation of humanity will harm the short-term investment portfolios of the wealthy and powerful. A significant portion of the United States population doesn’t believe that the disaster exists at all, and many of those who acknowledge its existence fail to understand its magnitude, so they divert their attention to social media, shallow entertainment, and petty celebrity scandals.
These harsh realities are existentially terrifying, endlessly infuriating, and exhaustingly complex, but that won’t stop Adam McKay from trying to address them all in a two-hour Netflix movie. The filmmaker is no stranger to topics of political significance: after making a few absurd comedies with Will Ferrell in the aughts, the writer-director pivoted to creating films about contemporary social issues. Anchorman 2 skewered the prejudice and mediocrity of the global news cycle, while The Big Short unpacked the Wall Street greed that led to the 2008 recession, and the Dick Cheney biopic Vice emphasized how one person’s abuse of power can devastate the entire world. Now, McKay is back with Don’t Look Up, an admirably ambitious project that tackles all these topics and more. It’s a comedy for the climate crisis, with a planet-killing comet standing in for environmental destruction.
The film features more A-list movie-stars than all of McKay’s prior projects combined. Leonardo DiCaprio leads the pack as aw-shucks Michigan State astronomy professor Dr. Randall Mindy, while Jennifer Lawrence returns from what feels like a decade-long acting hiatus to play Kate Dibiaski, Mindy’s graduate student who discovers the comet. Together, they embark on a panicked press tour to warn the world of its impending doom, leading to bizarre encounters with talk show hosts (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry), pop stars (Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi), a tech mogul (Mark Rylance), and the President of the United States (Meryl Streep). None of these people prove helpful to the cause –– the musicians contribute an awful original song to spread awareness about the comet, and the rest of the scientists’ potential allies favor profit, power, and status over tangible action and truth.
The film deftly identifies what’s wrong with American culture in the 21st century: late-capitalist politics, media spins, Internet echo chambers, conspiracy theories, and tech companies are all melting our brains and ensuring our eventual destruction. But the satire is a planet wide and an inch deep, offering almost nothing funny or resonant to say about any of those dynamics or topics. It just thinly recreates them without much comment and expects us to think it’s provocative. It’s similar to how Saturday Night Live spent the entire Trump administration just reenacting actual situations that occurred — without including much additional humor — and expecting our base recognition of its references to register as cutting political commentary. It’s not that the jokes aren’t funny, it’s that it’s hard to identify what’s supposed to be a joke in the first place. Trumpism has repeatedly proven to be nigh-unsatirizable, primarily because no fictional hyperbole can top the bleak ridiculousness of reality. The most absurd act or quote from an imaginary politician could just as easily appear in an actual headline, so any joke you write sounds like a statement of fact.
Despite the challenges of post-Trump satire, an entertainer of McKay’s talents should still be able to cook up a couple hours of laughs that aren’t grasping at political commentary. His Ferrell vehicles each have numerous memorably-funny scenes that hinge on preposterous line deliveries, exaggerated facial expressions, and killer comic timing, so this should be no different. Yet Don’t Look Up is so concerned with the importance of its central topics that it refuses to consistently engage with its cast’s silly side. DiCaprio and Lawrence are some of our more serious movie stars, to be sure, but they’ve demonstrated their comedic abilities in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Silver Linings Playbook, respectively. Here, they’re reduced to mostly humorless and disappointingly one-note characters, whose rare attempts at jokes are pretty mean-spirited –– we’re meant to laugh at their anxiety attacks and pessimistic standoffishness, but these qualities are just sad and futile, not funny.
The rest of the cast has even less to work with. Streep and Blanchett are weirdly lifeless in similar ways here, just doing bare minimum politician and talk-show-host stock characters without any edge, personality, or energy. Rob Morgan is dramatically solid but never funny as a sympathetic government official, and the same can be said for Melanie Lynskey as Mindy’s wife. The other “comic relief” characters each hinge on singular ideas that are such obvious pieces of low-hanging fruit that no performer could breathe sufficient life into them. Jonah Hill plays a mean guy who talks too casually for the White House — LOL! Grande and Kid Cudi are shallow, image-obsessed celebrities –– good one! Rylance is a spacey, tic-heavy tech titan — classic! Timothée Chalamet is the only cast member who should emerge from this project unscathed, turning in a hilarious deadpan performance somewhere between his douchey Lady Bird role and that SoundCloud rapper sketch he did on SNL. He’s the only one giving a performance that would fit into one of McKay’s more straightforward early-career comedies.
The filmmaking techniques aren’t much better than the performances. Hank Corwin’s disorientingly-choppy editing cuts scenes off while characters are still in the middle of a sentence, which might enhance the comedic effect if the interrupted lines were funny in the first place. Nicholas Britell, the undervalued composer responsible for two of the century’s most beautiful scores in If Beale Street Could Talk and Moonlight, delivers his laziest work to date –– the catchiest, brassiest cue sounds totally unfit for the scenes that it plays under, and the rest of the score sounds too much like cloying GarageBand loops to warrant such excessive repetition. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is the toughest to parse –– the oversaturated colors and slightly-grainy texture of the images ensure that the movie looks more artful than most of Netflix’s other productions, but those colors and textures clash with the docudrama-style shakiness of the compositions, and look quite strange when juxtaposed with the standard-looking stock footage that the film employs so frequently.
A movie like Don’t Look Up should be funny, thought-provoking, or both. But it’s neither, instead opting to be a tonally-confused primal scream that laments the most depressing aspects of contemporary society without adding anything of substance comedically, intellectually, or emotionally. I’m glad giant, high-concept swings like this can still be taken by American directors, but this one never connects.