A comet’s a comin’ in this funny and starry satire
Don’t Look Up (15, 138 mins) Verdict: Big hitters with plenty of impact ★★★★✩
APTLY enough for a film about celestial activity, this satirical black comedy from writer-director Adam McKay (Anchorman, Vice, The Big Short) is almost distractingly starry.
The cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Sir Mark Rylance and Timothée Chalamet, an A-list bunch by any measure.
DiCaprio and Lawrence play astronomers Dr Randall Mindy and Dr Kate Dibiasky who discover a comet on a collision course with Earth bigger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. With just over six months before the big bang, America divides broadly into two groups: those who know Armageddon is coming and ‘impact-deniers’.
The deniers are given succour by the dim-witted, image-obsessed U.S. President (Streep), more concerned with how the crisis might help her win the mid-term elections and by a global media titan (Rylance), who feels sure he has the technology to knock the pesky comet off course and, even more excitingly, to extract the $140 trillion worth of rare minerals inside it.
In the meantime, while Dr Dibiasky is reviled on social media for staying true to her convictions, nervy Dr Mindy becomes an improbable national celebrity (inspired, I suspect, by U.S. chief medical adviser Dr Fauci). He is even lured away from his wholesome provincial family life and into the bed of Blanchett’s vampish breakfast TV anchor (a development not, I hope, inspired by Dr Fauci).
All this is sporadically very funny indeed. At times, the comedy gets a bit too broad, maybe because there are so many targets for the satire: mad conspiracy theorists, social media influencers, breakfast TV, obsession with celebrity, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, on and on it goes (driven, it has to be said, by a conspicuously liberal agenda).
But the most cherishable treat in this film is Rylance. He plays the tycoon, Sir Peter Isherwell, as a surprisingly poor communicator (anyone who’s ever heard Sir Richard Branson umming and erring his way through a speech might have an inkling where that comes from), who is quite clearly on the autistic spectrum.
Whether that was scripted by McKay or improvised by Rylance, it is a truly priceless performance and on its own deserves to make this film about a big hit, a big hit. n Don’t Look Up is in cinemas now and on netflix from December 24.