Don’t Look Up
Adam McKay casts his net wide with his stellar dystopian black comedy addressing the state of the world.
News of the World: Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence
Adam McKay is about the best satirist working in Hollywood. With The Big Short (2015) he poked fun at triple-A subprime mortgage bonds, the intricacies of which were explained by Margot Robbie in a bubble bath. With Vice (2018) he took on the White House and escaped the litigious hand of former Vice President Dick Cheney because, well, “you couldn’t make up this shit.” Now McKay takes his mockery into outer space – at least, in how the world responds to imminent Armageddon.
And so we open with Jennifer Lawrence’s astronomy PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky tapping at a keyboard and observing the night sky on a monitor while mouthing the lyrics to Wu-Tang Clan’s ‘Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit’. It’s her Jodie Foster moment from Contact, complete with edits of the Subaru Telescope swinging into place to penetrate the outer reaches of our solar system. Then – bingo! – Dibiasky observes something out of the ordinary: a comet the size of Mount Everest on a collision course with Earth. Her professor, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), calculates that the impact will take place in six months, fourteen days, with extinction an undeniable by-product. However, such news is likely to dampen the president’s mid-term election chances, while TV news channels find the subject not sexy enough to warrant appropriate air time. And so Don’t Look Up is as much about denial as it is about the end of our planet. Sound familiar?
Like much of McKay’s stuff, Don’t Look Up boasts moments of sheer brilliance. Equally, the filmmaker is unafraid to keep his foot on the pedal and frequently pushes things too far. Many of his targets are familiar whipping boys: politics, the news media, social media, TV, pop music and everything in-between. But amongst all this he finds chinks that suggest a reality outside the norm. Meryl Streep’s power-mad president is a caricature, yet Cate Blanchett’s blonde, blue-eyed, dentally-enhanced TV presenter is a bright spark in bimbo’s clothing. She knows what she is, but plays the game. When she and Randall Mindy exchange their greatest achievements, she reveals that she has three masters degrees, speaks four languages, has slept with two ex-presidents and owns two Monets. He boasts that he had his Star Wars poster signed by Mark Hamill.
As the same old tropes are brushed off and played for maximum comic effect, Lawrence’s Kate Dibiasky remains a human presence. Side-lined by others hell-bent on turning this “potentially significant event” to their own personal gains, she puts the future of our world above her own interests. And for every scabrous line of pop-cultural allusion, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it montage of the wonders of our Green Planet. It’s hard not to be moved by such momentous material and Dibiasky is our emotional guide. One can read as many contemporary parallels into the subject matter as one likes.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi, Himesh Patel, Melanie Lynskey, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Michael Chiklis, Tomer Sisley, Paul Guilfoyle, Robert Joy, Sarah Silverman, Chris Evans, and the voice of Liev Schreiber.
Dir Adam McKay, Pro Adam McKay and Kevin Messick, Screenplay Adam McKay, from a story by Adam McKay and David Sirota, Ph Linus Sandgren, Pro Des Clayton Hartley, Ed Hank Corwin, Music Nicholas Britell, Costumes Susan Matheson, Sound Christopher Scarabosio, Dialect coach Francie Brown.
Hyperobject Industries-Netflix.
138 mins. USA. 2021. UK Rel: 24 December 2021. US Rel: 10 December 2021. Cert. 15 .
