‘Don’t Look Up’
In a tense war room in the White House, President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) sits with a high-ranking team of scientists and Pentagon officials. They are assembled together to launch a nuclear arsenal, led by a lone, veteran pilot (Ron Perlman) in a space shuttle, to strike against a formidable asteroid, a whopping 3 to 6 miles in size, hurtling toward Earth. If the asteroid were to strike, it would trigger an “extinction-level event” that would vaporize all life on the planet, so the hope is the nuclear force can change the trajectory just enough to spare us.
Everything is going to plan as the rockets lift off and into the sky, when the door to the war room suddenly opens, and Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), a tech mogul currently the third richest man on the planet, strides in. He calls the president out to confer with him a minute, and almost immediately thereafter, the nuclear force initiative is aborted, midflight. The rockets pop their parachutes, and the space shuttle returns back home before ever getting a chance to unload its payload.
As you can imagine, in “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s brutishly on-thenose satire, the reason for the aborted mission has nothing to do with the protection of the planet, and everything to do with the unfathomably valuable tech-building materials contained in the asteroid itself (hundreds of trillions of dollars worth, by Isherwell’s estimation). Instead of blowing it off-course, Isherwell, and his multi-billion dollar tech company, BASH (an obvious stand in for Google, Apple, Facebook, and every other tech behemoth that acts in its own interest at the expense of humanity), have come up with a counter-plan that involves not blowing the asteroid off-course, but into smaller, more easily navigable chunks, to be mined after BASH’s special drones take hold of the pieces and deposit them gently to Earth.
Naturally, McKay’s effort is intended as an eviscerating environmental screed, a thinly veiled reference to our current, equally nonsensical state of affairs, but it is often clumsily scattershot in its attacks. At first, the president and her minions create political divisiveness in the country by denying the existence of the comet in the first place; after it becomes plainly visible to the naked eye, she and her team push the mantra of denial (their slogan providing the film’s title), until it becomes politically expedient for her to instead take on the challenge of defending the planet, to bolster her re-election potential.
She is, in short, a boozy churl of an opportunist, and her ineffectual cabinet, lead by her frat-bro son (Jonah Hill) acting as her Chief-ofStaff, are shown to be callow, cynical and obsessed with optics (the White House suggests people should be thinking about the number of jobs the comet will create, instead of the damage it could do). The country is idiotically divided and at war with itself as to believing in science or denying it, and the fate of existence lies in the hands of the preternatural Isherwell, who speaks in a high-pitched sing-song, and whose company’s all pervasive algorithms can determine with 96% certainty the date and manner of each user’s death.
For every solid societal burn (a Tik Tok challenge that involves people firing lit roman candles into their faces), there are many much less successful ventures: As with what happens to Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), an astro-physicist at Michigan State, when he becomes the “face” of the issue. He becomes celebrated for his good looks on national TV, and eventually gives in to the sudden rush of fame by bedding down the vapid host (Cate Blanchett) of a popular morning news show; or, for that matter, the fate of Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), a PhD. student who made the initial discovery of the comet, who becomes a popular meme by appearing on the same morning show and profanely telling everyone they’re all going to die.
Despite the film’s more than worthy subject matter — there might never be a more deserving period of history with which to apply the full power of a satirical scathing — things don’t quite pan out. Employing McKay’s patented snark-in-the-faceof-the-industrial-complex style (used to great effect in “The Big Short,” among others) and with a high-end cast, also including Timothee Chalamet, Melanie Lynskey, Tyler Perry and Rob Morgan, among many others, the film should be a lot more derisive fun than it turns out to be.
Part of the trouble is the broadness of McKay’s approach, which too often lacks the precision and clarity that can take a scene beyond a simple gag (Kate is confused when one high-ranking military official tricks her into paying for the otherwise free snacks available at the White House), into something more incisive and surgically cutting. We live in an age in which the lines have blurred so much between traditional satire and the barely believable reality we actually inhabit, one needs the jet-black ink of a poison fountain pen to etch them in properly, and, for the most part, McKay’s film feels like it’s stuck using a beaten up box of half-broken crayons.
It would be interesting to see what a more intellectually minded satirist like Armando Iannucci might do with similar material (he is, after all, a man able to make Josef Stalin’s political purges funny), as it would likely cut a lot deeper than this poorly conceived fiasco. McKay seems to swing a mighty sword, taking on the cynical political system that takes facts and turns them into debatable opinions for an uptick in polling numbers, and a tech sector that reduces everything to endless, portfolio-enhancing data crunching, but the blade turns out to be little more than a dull rubber prop, alas.