Don’t Look Up: May the Planet Jest in Peace

Are you familiar with the scientific phenomenon known as climate change? If not, then you might find Don’t Look Up, the new star-studded political satire from Adam McKay, to be profoundly eye-opening. Doubtless, McKay wishes it to provoke outrage as well as laughter; this has been his shtick ever since The Other Guys’ closing credits featured a flurry of graphics illustrating the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme. It isn’t a critic’s job to predict how an audience will react, but I suspect that most people who possess rudimentary knowledge of global warming (and I, to be clear, am no expert) will greet McKay’s latest effort not with howls of fury but with snorts of derision. I suppose Don’t Look Up is a passion project, in the same way that certain third graders can be passionate when they’re arguing for a snow day.

It feels somewhat mean to criticize a movie that carries such an urgent message, even if the delivery of that message is fairly mean. To be sure, anger is an appropriate response to society’s collective shrug toward its own existential threat, and it’s undeniably maddening that the fact of climate change is still framed as a political issue—a polarizing debate in which #BothSides present meritorious arguments. Yet agitprop tends to be more persuasive when it’s targeted; here, McKay paints with such a broad brush that he sacrifices precision. In addition to attempting to skewer the electoral establishment—embodied here by Meryl Streep as a coldly calculating, vaguely Trumpian president, flanked by an army of flunkies and an Oedipally charged chief of staff (Jonah Hill)—he also lampoons greedy tech profiteers (Mark Rylance plays an awkward genius designed to recall Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk), militaristic jingoism (Ron Perlman pops up as a demented former general), mainstream media (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry play fatuous morning-show anchors), celebrity culture (Ariana Grande and Scott Mescudi suck up some oxygen as vain pop stars), millennial slackerdom (Timothée Chalamet receives a measure of dignity as a skateboarder), and social-media vacuity (fake memes routinely spring up). It’s a lot—the film clocks in at a baggy 145 minutes—and that muchness seems to be an element of McKay’s broader point. If you aren’t part of the solution—that is, if you don’t subscribe exactly to his hazy set of principles, which I guess could be described as Pro-Science—then you’re part of the planet-killing problem.

Maybe he’s right. But for all its star power and self-righteousness, I’m skeptical that Don’t Look Up will function to change any minds or inspire any action. It seems instead to operate as an elaborate and extended middle finger pointed directly toward its viewers, a holier-than-thou screed aimed at the dim-witted miscreants who got us into this mess (i.e., all of us). The film’s title derives from a hashtag which deluded politicians and their mouth-breathing constituents wield after learning that a deadly comet is hurtling toward Earth; rather than mobilize for the collective good, they prefer to own the libs, mocking and discrediting the scientists who warn of impending ecological catastrophe as doomsayers and worrywarts. McKay, whose post-Will Ferrell career has involved decrying the chicanery of America’s banks in The Big Short and exposing the amorality of Dick Cheney in Vice, seems to be riding that same comet; he’s a sneering version of Slim Pickens straddling the bomb in Dr. Strangelove, damning us to hell as the world is about to explode.

Again, this despair is understandable, even if it isn’t productive. What bothers me about Don’t Look Up isn’t its finger-wagging tone but its frenetic style. McKay tends to edit his movies like a butcher, chopping them into tiny pieces and then stitching them together with rapid cuts and random transitions. This results in a few clever smash cuts—the film affords a number of incensed diatribes to its heroic, hopeless scientists, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, only to abruptly terminate them mid-sentence, followed by a shot of the dismayed prophets seated in a black government vehicle with shrouds over their heads—but for the most part it scans as chaos without purpose. That’s true of the camera as well, which hovers and flits and bobs, imagining a faux immediacy that really just betrays McKay’s disinterest in visual composition. (The cinematographer, unbelievably, is La La Land DP Linus Sandgren.)

Perhaps McKay believes that it doesn’t matter what his movies look like, so long as they’re funny. He’s wrong, but it wouldn’t matter if he were right, because the picture’s comedy quotient is disturbingly low. McKay has assembled an estimable and hard-working cast—it’s been too long since we’ve seen Lawrence or DiCaprio, and both embrace their roles with brio—but most of the actors struggle to enliven the script’s would-be zingers with any spark or punch. (The exceptions are Hill, Blanchett, and occasionally Chalamet.) As is always true when the volume is this high, a few lines land—there’s an amusing runner in which Lawrence’s astronomer obsesses over being swindled for ten bucks by a high-ranking military official—but for the most part, the film mistakes panic for humor, assuming that simply placing characters in embarrassing and stressful situations relieves it of the obligation to make those situations funny. That’s the true disaster on display here. Sure, climate change is real, but the more immediate cause for alarm represented in Don’t Look Up is that the director of Anchorman—one of the most hilarious movies of the new millennium—seems to have forgotten how to tell a proper joke.

Grade: C+