![]() As the two scientists who discover the comet, Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio palpably communicate alarm and frustration, maintaining their characters’ bedrock humanity even as the film casts them ever further into the absurd. Where Don’t Look Up finds its strength is in its lead performances, which can’t be undone even by the film’s exhausting, rapid-fire editing and McKay’s aggressive indicating toward his own punchlines. Simply making fun of pop stars and pundits and Trumpism is easy and ineffectual, as either parody or polemic. His film needn’t have offered some actionable strategy for combating climate change apathy, but it could have been more daring or nuanced in its targeting of that indifference. But there’s less instructive value in that observation than McKay seems to think there is. The joke, I suppose, is that even when something isn’t our fault, we will still fail to embrace whatever tactics might exist to stop its happening. Much time is spent in the film attempting to address that imbalance: the point is not the comet itself, but rather the thwarted, vain, too-late efforts to stop it. (Namely, us.) While there are certainly comparisons to be drawn between how McKay’s characters react to their imminent doom and how we in the real world are responding to ours, Don’t Look Up’s act of God sort of lets us off the hook, blame wise. A comet strike is a random event born of the universe’s chaos-quite unlike climate change, which has obvious causal agents. It’s easy to see the metaphor here, though there’s a problem in the design. The masses won’t accept what’s happening, even when credible and credentialed scientists cry from the mountaintops that they’re doomed. What the pop star is singing about is a massive comet that’s hurtling toward Earth, while the feckless ninnies in Washington try to dismiss the disaster or, later, monetize it. The skewering has to be surgically precise to work, and precision is not a mode McKay seems capable of. The tricky thing about satire is that it’s really tricky. Whatever broadly worthy message the movie has is drowned out by a parade of movie-star mugging and stale pop culture jokes. But as he did with The Big Short and Vice, McKay lacquers Don’t Look Up with an impenetrable layer of smugness. There has been a curious dearth of movies that look intently at climate change, so McKay’s intentions are noble. The film is a long, overweeningly arch satire of government negligence and intransigence of the media’s complicity in allowing that to be the political norm and of a widespread American ethos that refuses to recognize the waters lapping at our feet, the fires tearing through our neighbors’ homes, for what they are.Īs subject matter, it’s entirely necessary. Don’t Look Up (in theaters December 10, Netflix December 24) is an allegory for climate change, a man-made mess that those same men seem hellbent on denying. Having had his fill of past disasters-the 2008 financial crisis and the bloody reign of Dick Cheney-director Adam McKay has turned his attention to a current catastrophe.
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