Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Jennifer Lawrence, Timothée Chalamet, Jonah Hill, Ariana Grande, Mark Rylance, Ron Perlman — we’d watch this group rake leaves together. That they can all be in a movie together should be all we need to know in order to get to the theaters (or, perhaps more likely, log into our Netflix accounts) this holiday season. Don’t Look Up, the latest from Vice and The Big Short writer/director Adam McKay, is nominated for four Golden Globes, including Best Picture. But is it actually any good?
McKay has assembled a dream team of acting talent for a story, credited to the left-wing journalist and former Bernie Sanders campaign spokesman David Sirota, that blends apocalyptic science fiction with political parody and media satire — think Armageddon and Independence Day meet Network and Wag the Dog. This latest end-of-the-world film begins with two astronomers studying their latest findings. They’ve spotted a comet with an unusual trajectory. After a few quick calculations accompanied by the obligatory shots of scientists scribbling a cluster of equations on a blackboard, these scientists realize their staggering discovery: the comet is headed for Earth. And because the comet is roughly the size of Mt. Everest, the impact would end all life on the planet.
These scientists are Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio, wearing wire-framed glasses, an unbecoming neck beard, and a few extra pounds), a professor of astronomy at Michigan State, and Kate Dibiasky (Lawrence, also deprived of her usual glamour through baggy clothes and an unflattering amber hairdo), an astrophysics Ph.D. student. Mindy and Dibiasky report their findings to Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, the head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, a real-world division of NASA, as an on-screen graphic tells us. Oglethorpe gets the astronomers a meeting at the White House, where they will presumably be able to warn the leader of the free world about this impending “extinction-level event.” The only problem is that the president (Streep) is a feckless joke of a leader who has appointed her idiotic son (Jonah Hill) as chief of staff and who is more concerned with finding ways to sneak cigarettes into the Oval Office and with the fate of her ridiculously unqualified Supreme Court nominee than the fate of the planet.
After the president blows them off, they go on The Daily Rip, a morning talk show that appears to be parodying MSNBC’s Morning Joe. When Mindy and Dibiasky try to tell the show’s hosts and the world that there’s a comet heading directly for Earth that will destroy all life on the planet unless it can be driven off its course, the TV talking heads respond insouciantly with comedy instead of actual concern. “That’s very exciting,” says Bremmer about the news of the planet-killing comet. “Will it hit this one house in particular — my ex-wife’s house?” “Let’s keep the bad news light. It helps the medicine go down,” our scientist heroes are instructed, the ordinary showbiz rules of TV news still operating in the face of Armageddon. Dibiasky loses her wits and explodes: “The destruction of the planet isn’t supposed to be fun!” The video of her on-air tirade goes viral, giving the filmmakers an opportunity to satirize the ways that any unconventional behavior caught on camera can quickly become the object of national ridicule.
Things are looking pretty bleak for Mindy and Dibiasky and for the planet until a political twist of fortune causes the planet-killing comet report to go from being an inconvenient truth for President Orlean to a suddenly convenient chance to deflect attention from her latest political scandal. In an all-too-familiar political volte-face, she opportunistically embraces the comet story, making Mindy her chief science adviser and, in a Mission Accomplished-style speech on the deck of a battleship, announcing that her administration will be supporting a mission led by a politically incorrect spaceship pilot (Ron Perlman) to deflect the comet away from Earth. But after an intervention by Orleans’s megadonor (Rylance), an effete, soft-spoken tech, smartphone, and space aviation mogul and a parody of a hybrid version of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, this mission, and the future of all life on the planet, is thrown once again into serious doubt.
McKay established his bona fides as an expert satirist of the news media in his now-classic Anchorman (2004), and his satire of the media, now updated for the age of memes and Instagram reels, is still bitingly funny. His political satire, however, is far less sharp. Although McKay and Sirota clearly borrowed certain thematic and stylistic devices from the great 1997 Barry Levinson film Wag the Dog, the thought put into its portrayals of American politics has more of a feel of a hastily put together Saturday Night Live skit than a truly thoughtful and original film. This in and of itself would not be surprising — after all, the history of cinema encompasses a long list of bad political parodies — were it not for the fact that McKay is an astute student of politics, as evidenced by his last film, Vice (2018). The shots at the Marjorie Taylor Greene-type of incendiary right-wing conspiracy theorists (“Jewish billionaires invented the comet threat so they could confiscate our guns”) are cheap and easy, as are the shots at flag- and country-loving conservatives, whom the film portrays as stupid and gullible enough to believe that a comet heading directly for Earth, and which they can see in the sky with their very own eyes, is not in fact heading for the planet merely because their political hero tells them it’s not. When Orlean’s supporters begin chanting “Don’t Look Up!” at political rallies, we realize that the film’s title was probably chosen to evoke gratingly the “Lock her up!” chants from Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rallies.
Don’t Look Up is also not helped by McKay’s frequent overuse of way-too-close close-ups and shifty, jittery camerawork, an annoying directorial penchant that also marred his otherwise brilliant 2015 film The Big Short, and by his heavy-handed attempts to mock climate change skeptics. The term “impact deniers” in the film targets climate denialists, but satire is supposed to involve some element of subtlety in allowing the audience to adduce the connection between an absurd fiction and an absurd reality. McKay’s satire here seems to have a bad grasp on the political reality, and he doesn’t trust his audience to figure anything out for itself. It is hard to laugh while being spoonfed.
Despite all this, Don’t Look Up is still worth watching for the performances alone. This ridiculously good cast did not have the fortune of starring in a movie worthy of their talent, but they did their utmost to make it nearly into one. DiCaprio is convincing as an anxious, pill-popping professor from Lansing, Michigan, who, even after he becomes famous as the Dr. Fauci of comets, still resembles your middle school science teacher more than he does Neil deGrasse Tyson. When he’s given some tasty scenery-chewing moments, he bursts out of his character’s shell and makes the most of them, especially during a furious jeremiad one day on The Daily Rip that conjures some of Howard Beale’s fiercest fusillades. Blanchett’s turn as an amoral TV talk show host working hard to fight off her congenital snobbery is as much of a guilty pleasure to watch as it must have been for her to act, and the hilarious Jonah Hill sends a smile to your face with every inane line he utters. It wouldn’t be the end of the world to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday night with this company.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Salzburg.