Don’t Look Up (15): Why parody someone when you can parody a whole country?

A One Mann’s Movies review of “Don’t Look Up” (2021).

Bob the Movie Man Rating:

I’m a fan of Adam McKay’s caustically satirical movies, with “The Big Short” (2015) and “Vice” (2018) being movies I can watch multiple times. But with “Don’t Look Up” I was really starting to wonder where he was going….

Plot Summary:

Two Michigan-based astronomers – Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) – make a surprising and appalling discovery: that a comet is just 6 months away from a planet-killing impact with Earth. They have to convince President Orlean (Meryl Streep) of the impending doom, but she and her hopeless Chief-of- Staff son Jason (Jonah Hill) seem more concerned with party politics.

Perhaps big business in the form of billionaire businessman Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) can help?

Certification:

US: R. UK: 15.

Talent:

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Rob Morgan, Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Himesh Patel.

Directed by: Adam McKay.

Written by: Adam McKay (from a story by David Sirota)

Don’t Look Up Review:

Positives:

• I’m used to Adam McKay picking a target for his satire (e.g. Dick Cheney; the US mortgage market) and then going for them. But this is different: a work of fiction similar to “Armageddon” and (my personal favourite) “Deep Impact”. This confused me. It came as a dawning realisation (and a very positive one) that his target here was the whole of modern-day America. And the parody is just brilliant.
  • You can fully see Meryl Streep’s vainglorious president being Trump under similar circumstances (an appalling thought!). The whole “Don’t Look Up” campaign, complete with the baseball caps, is superb;
  • Mark Rylance is wickedly funny as a bizarre cross between Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. At one point he goes full Goldmember on you!
  • Social media and the desire for “likes” is viciously lampooned.
  • And the whole relationship between scientists, the public, big business and conspiracy theorists has never been brought into sharper relief in these Covid times.
• The stellar cast all give it their all (although I personally didn’t think that DiCaprio is quite as adept at this type of comedy as the other cast members).

Negatives:

• Tonally, the film is a bit all over the place at times.
• I personally don’t find Jonah Hill to be very funny. I found some of his contributions distracting and a bit juvenile compared with the general cutting-edge black comedy. But that might just be a personal view.

Monkeys?

There are two excellent monkeys at the end of the film. The mid-credits one is particularly funny, delivering the pay-off on a joke set up much earlier in the film. There’s also a short post-credits scene involving Jonah Hill.

Summary Thoughts on “Don’t Look Up”

A really interesting film, that I must watch again, now I know where it’s going. But, like me, I think a lot of people will struggle to see the joke. For example, I saw one comment from another online critic saying “It’s not as good as Armageddon”. That kind of misses the point by a couple of hundred parsecs!

Trailer for “Don’t Look Up”

The trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL9aJcqrtnw .