Don’t Look Up: A Satirical Comet of Errors
Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), a Ph.D. student, discovers a previously unknown celestial object while working on her doctorate. Overjoyed, she calls her colleagues to the lab, but Dr. Randall Mindy’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) calculations quickly wipe the smiles off their faces. It turns out that a massive comet is hurtling directly towards Earth, and if nothing is done, there’s a 99.7% chance it will wipe out all life on the planet. With the support of NASA, the scientists head to meet the President (Meryl Streep), but she’s more interested in dealing with political scandals than a global threat. The news is simply ignored by the public, and when the government finally takes action, its ideas are, to put it mildly, idiotic. It seems humanity is doomed.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr. Randall Mindy in a still from “Don’t Look Up”
A Familiar Formula with a Twist
In recent years, Adam McKay has been making films with a very specific method: taking an important but complex topic for the average viewer – like the financial crisis (“The Big Short”) or the workings of the White House (“Vice”) – and explaining it in simple terms, with humorous infographics and other postmodern gimmicks, something usually reserved for long, tedious documentaries. In “Don’t Look Up,” he seems to outwardly adhere to the same style: quasi-documentary handheld shooting, biting dialogues, sudden stock footage, and pop-up inscriptions, as if breaking the fabric of the film and shifting the conversation into reality. But now the events are fictional, a kind of fantasy on a theme understandable to absolutely any layman: a scathing satire on the pandemic reality, in which the government ignores obvious threats, and people look for conspiratorial plots where everything is actually transparent.
Meryl Streep as the President of the United States in a still from “Don’t Look Up”
When Satire Loses Its Edge
This change of context while maintaining the style doesn’t benefit McKay. If before all his dramaturgical swagger was justified by the heaviness of the material, now it looks somewhat alien: as if someone is trying too hard to explain something you knew even before the film started. Yes, the government won’t lift a finger until it’s backed into a corner. Yes, mainstream media tries to make any news “comfortable” and doesn’t want to scare people, even when it’s absolutely necessary. Pop stars are empty shells, the military are pompous idiots, and multi-billionaires like Musk are not saviors of humanity, but sociopaths with delusions of grandeur. Conservatives and liberals can only argue on the Internet and make memes; they are good for nothing else. The film has a big problem with the latter: “Don’t Look Up” demonstrates in one episode how the actions of the characters affect the World Wide Web, and it’s clear that McKay doesn’t understand Internet culture at all. Trying to show the memeification of events, he becomes like a distant relative from “Odnoklassniki,” forwarding demotivators to everyone on WhatsApp in 2021.
A Comet of Truths
For two hours, “Don’t Look Up” throws truisms at the viewer, building a hyperbolized portrait of a post-COVID (or pre-meteorite) society, where all familiar attributes are turned up to the maximum. Sometimes it’s funny, almost always terribly ridiculous – but very rarely witty. But here’s the trick: it seems that this time McKay isn’t even trying to be witty. His main weapon now is a compelling, sincere anger at everyone he so persistently ridicules. Politicians, businessmen, ordinary people, even liberal Hollywood, just looking for an excuse to create a new blockbuster on a topical theme (that is, he laughs at himself too, fully aware of the opportunistic nature of his film). McKay shows a humanity that shouldn’t survive – and you, as a viewer, are surprised to find yourself rooting for the comet. In this sense, the film is closer not even to “Vice” or “The Big Short,” but to something like “Falling Down,” another armor-piercing and deeply embittered satire that doesn’t aim to be subtle in the slightest.
Cate Blanchett in a still from “Don’t Look Up”
A Reflection of Our World
“Don’t Look Up” says a lot about our world by its very existence. Because how much did it take to drive an author like Adam McKay – a man clearly not stupid and sensitive to what is happening around him – to abandon all formalities and make a film so straightforward in its message? As if he was simply tired of explaining something and realized his own powerlessness before the viewer, and therefore decided to simply kill humanity to hell, showing all its hopeless stupidity in bright colors in the end. However, you can’t call him a complete misanthrope. When “Don’t Look Up” finishes mocking everyone it can, the film suddenly opens up from a completely new angle – as a tender melodrama about people trying to preserve the remnants of humanity in this crazy, cruel world. Only in the finale do we understand why the director needed big actors like DiCaprio and Lawrence at all, and not comedians from SNL. It’s for these small final scenes, where biting irony fades into the background, hidden behind the story of small, doomed people who, at the family table in the last seconds of life, finally understand why they existed at all.
The uneven intonation of the film well reflects the mood of the characters – running around in circles throughout the film and desperately trying to prove something to someone, then falling into painful apathy, then losing their way due to the popularity that has fallen on them, they eventually come to terms with the world and themselves. The lyrical, almost religious finale stands out strongly from everything that was in the film before, and at the same time feels like the only right thing to do. Both for this particular film, and, apparently, for humanity in general.