Don’t Look Up

Adam McKay’s catastrophe comedy doesn’t land the same devastating direct hit as the fictional asteroid of this star-studded satire.

In Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, humankind is facing a devastating reality that will ultimately result in the end of life on Earth. 

The evidence is clear and undeniable – this is going to happen. If the citizens of planet Earth are to have any chance of preserving life and enabling the continued existence of future generations, they must immediately take collective action in order prevent the inevitable and undeniable annihilation that awaits them. 

Sacrifices must be made. Your way of life might need to change, your stock price might go down, your corporation’s revenue might shrink – but the prize couldn’t be bigger or more significant; life on planet Earth won’t come to a premature end.

Believe it or not, Don’t Look Up is not the latest eye-opening, jaw-dropping film about the very real issue of climate change that we, as a collective, actually face. Instead, McKay swaps the slow-burning and not-so-sexy issue of global warming for something a bit more Hollywood; a Mt. Everest-sized asteroid that is hurtling towards Earth, expected to make impact in a mere six months and destroy everything in its wake.

This shocking discovery is made by scientists Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Dr Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), who recognise the immediate importance of what they have found and set out to alert the Government and media in the United States, safe in the knowledge that those at the forefront of running, protecting, and informing the country will take decisive action to save humanity.

That’s not exactly how things pan out.

Mindy and Dibiasky’s tour of various government departments and media outlets sees them meet an ever-increasing spawn of self-centred individuals from America’s corridors of power and information. They meet uninterested President Orlean, Meryl Streep’s female Trump, and daytime TV’s ratings supremos Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett. While trying to convey their message, Mindy and Dibiasky face the full brunt of… well, culture in 2021. They are memefied, they are hashtagged, they are digested and cancelled after one public appearance. 

The world isn’t as receptive to the news of impending doom as Mindy and Dibiasky had expected. People don’t care. They want to keep it light. It’s only 99.7% likely? Well, what are we worrying about? 

Special mention goes to Jonah Hill, as President Orlean’s son and chief of staff. He takes a day off from his current admirable persona of intellectual film director and self-help guru to throw things all the way back to the halcyon days of Superbad, delivering an ongoing barrage of ridiculous, improvised takedowns during his scenes with Lawrence and DiCaprio. Jennifer Lawrence described her time on set with Hill as ‘really, really hard’, because she found it so difficult to hold in her laughter to avoid spoiling each take. At least, as viewers, we don’t need have the same problem from the comfort of our own homes.

You can split director Adam McKay’s career thus far into two distinct periods. Between 2004 and 2013, McKay was the undisputed king of those compulsively quotable American comedies that made their way into the lexicon of young adults on both sides of the Atlantic. You know the ones: Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, The Other Guys; all written and directed by McKay. 

After almost a decade of dominating the box office with some of the most memorable comedies of the 21st century, something changed within McKay. It happens to the best of us. We grow older, we mature, we find creative inspiration from places other than just dumping Will Ferrell at the centre of as many hilarious situations as possible.

The first hint of a shift in McKay’s output came during the end credit sequence of 2010’s The Other Guys. While the names of film’s cast and crew are shown, McKay presents a series of facts and figures relating to Ponzi schemes and the US Treasury’s $700 billion bail-out of the banks who were to blame for the global financial crisis, all soundtracked by Rage Against the Machine (of course. Rage! Machine! Protest! Yes! Fuck!). The data shown during the credits isn’t particularly relevant to the film itself – which is a tongue-in-cheek comedy that spoofs buddy cop movies with a hint of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street – but it’s our first glimpse of McKay’s desire to provide commentary on a more serious subject matter.

In 2015, McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, The Big Short, signalled a significant change in the director’s career trajectory. The film centres around the select few who proactively identified the fact that the United States’ housing market was a bubble ready to burst, then bet against the big investment banks to profit when the market collapse happened. 

This housing market collapse triggered the global financial crisis and, like Jay-Z before launching into ’99 Problems’ at Glastonbury 2008, McKay just had one thing to say.

The Big Short saw McKay turn a corner and deliver a razor-sharp takedown on each of the elements that triggered the financial crisis: the US financial system, capitalism, ignorance, and greed. Funny and searing in equal measure, with the added ingenuity of utilising Margot Robbie in a bubble bath and Anthony Bourdain’s approach to a fish stew to explain complex financial concepts, The Big Short hit every mark, even earning McKay an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

With an Oscar in tow, McKay’s next project came with raised expectations. Maybe he was the guy to shine a light on crucial American issues? Maybe, with his films, McKay could achieve what Michael Moore had done in the early 2000s with documentaries like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, rallying against the American right-wing in a cutting, concise manner?

With Vice, McKay’s vilifying biopic of American Vice President Dick Cheney, we came expecting another incisive dismantling of a burning contemporary issue, this time of American foreign policy and the US Government’s actions under the War on Terror banner. While admittedly a decent film, all we really got was another pinpoint performance from Christian Bale (and the short-lived joy of a criminally underused Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush).

Vice doesn’t have the same focus as The Big Short. You leave knowing Cheney was a monster, but it doesn’t take over two hours to find that out. The same can be said about Don’t Look Up.

Don’t Look Up’s message isn’t subtle – it’s crude, it’s on-the-nose – McKay is drawing a parallel with the real-life response to Science’s warnings about climate change. While DiCaprio reportedly waited ‘years for a script’ that would allow him to represent his views towards the climate crisis that we face, the film doesn’t really do anything other than shine a light on the things we already know. Those who accept we are facing a crisis already question why strong measures aren’t being legislated now to fight the battle that we are already losing, and those who don’t care won’t be swayed by the surface-level message that the film represents. Where The Big Short took something that the majority of people didn’t really know enough about, distilling it down in a way that could make us collectively furious about something that had already happened, Don’t Look Up just marginally reinforces the message that already frustrates us.

The reason Don’t Look Up seems to fall short is because we are exposed to so much satire-worthy content in real life that the events on screen don’t really shock us anymore. ‘Satire-worthy content’ might be being polite; maybe what I really mean is that we are exposed to so many instances of completely ridiculous behaviour from people in lofty positions, meaning we are almost numb to seeing Meryl Streep and co. portraying scenarios that are arguably less mind-boggling as those we find on our screens on a daily basis. 

The omnipresence of social media means we don’t need to wait for Adam McKay to present us with a new film full of A-list Hollywood talent to realise how ridiculous the world we live in is. A quick scroll through Twitter will reward you with a clip from an American media outlet that is just as – if not exponentially more – ridiculous than anything that McKay and his writing partners can come up with. 

Yes, Don’t Look Up’s of a fictional on/off musician couple (self-deprecatingly played by Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi) rekindling their love and agreeing to marry live on a daytime news show gets a laugh, but it’s not as funny or ridiculous as the moment where brothers Andrew and Chris Cuomo – one being the (now-former) Governor of New York, since cancelled due to sexual harassment accusations, the other being a (now-former) television host, since cancelled due to their association with their perverted brother – bickering live on CNN about who their mother loved most. 

And it’s definitely not as insane as the segment on Fox News where a reference to the Netflix series ‘You’ caused enough cringeworthy confusion that led clueless host Laura Ingraham to deny she had suffered from measles:

‘In [Netflix drama] You, measles came up.’

‘Wait, wait, wait; when did I mention measles?’

‘It was on You.’

‘What was on me? What are you talking about? I never had the measles.’

‘You! It’s a show called You on Netflix.’

‘There’s a show called Laura Ingraham on Netflix?’

Now that is funny, and gives Anchorman’s Channel 4 news team a run for their money. The point is that satire really hits when it’s subtle, when it can emphasise and parody real-life by being over-the-top and surreal. With Don’t Look Up, we’ve seen enough from the COVID-19 pandemic, from the ongoing debate around climate change, global warming, and the Insulate Britain movement to make us numb to anything that a Hollywood satire can throw at us.

If the time comes and life imitates art, maybe we should get it over with and welcome the asteroid with open arms. We’ve officially crossed the divide; we’re beyond parody.