A review of the new movie “Don’t Look Up”
Director Adam McKay is responsible for some fine films, notably “The Big Short” which dissected the sub-prime housing crisis in the US and “Vice” which shone a bright light on the administration of the second Bush president.
Here he presents a hugely ambitious and often sharp satire of the current failure of so much of America’s political and media establishment to accept the validity of science and screamingly obvious facts. If that failure was bad enough in the case of Trump and his supporters in relation to the global pandemic, this movie tells the story of reaction to the news that a large comet is about to hit the Earth and extinguish humankind.
The work sports a fabulous cast including Jennifer Lawrence as the red-haired astronomer who first discovered the killer comet, Leonard DiCaprio as the bearded lead scientist warning of the threat, Meryl Streep as the blonde-haired president who is in denial, an (almost) unrecognisable Mark Rylance as the IT guru advising the president, and Cate Blanchett as a vapid television host, not to mention Jonah Hill, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman and even Ariana Grande.
So much of the script resonates with recent American politics, such as the injunction to the president’s supporters that they can ignore the comet in the sky if they “Don’t look up”, an echo of the call at Trump rallies that the right course of action to Hillary Clinton is to “Lock her up”.
The film has had a mixed reception. The public has largely loved it but critics have been more sceptical. I confess that, much though I endorse the message that we need to listen to scientists and much though there are some delightfully comic scenes, I incline towards the position of the critics.
Satire needs to walk a fine line between credibility and craziness and, for me, too much of the material is simply cartoonish. Based on his abundant resources of big data and artificial intelligence, the guru figure makes two predictions as to how leading characters will die. His short-term prediction – a matter of months ahead – is totally wrong, while his long-term forecast – 22,740 years in the future – is astonishingly accurate. Does this matter? To me, it represents some of the flaws in the movie: too often outlandish and off-target.