The new Netflix film Don’t Look Up is sort of the big budget sequel to celebrities singing Imagine, The film has an impressive cast—Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep—unfortunately they’ve all gathered in the service of a preachy climate change comedy that even a lot of left-wing reviewers found to be not very funny or illuminating.
If you’ve missed the concept of this one, it’s pretty simple. Two scientists discover a planet-killing comet is going to wipe out the earth in six months. The government plans to blow it up with nuclear missiles but that plan is put on hold when it’s discovered the comet is full of valuable minerals. The back up plan is to break up the comet and collect the valuable pieces that fall to earth. Meanwhile, the whole situation becomes so politicized that one scientist encourages people to just look up to see the comet really is coming while a backlash to this encourages people to do the opposite, i.e. don’t look up. If that analogy to climate change sounds pretty strained and not very funny, well that’s what a lot of reviewers thought too. Here’s Rolling Stone’s take:
Somewhere out there, someone may be crafting the ultimate Swiftian skewering of our cultural death-spiral moment — but Don’t Look Up is most certainly not that. So caught up in its own hysterical shrieking that it drowns out any laughs, or sense of poignancy, or points it might be trying to make, McKay’s screed imagines the response that would greet such dire news circa right now…
Don’t Look Up is a blunt instrument in lieu of a sharp razor, and while McKay may believe that we’re long past subtlety, it doesn’t mean that one man’s wake-up-sheeple howl into the abyss is funny, or insightful, or even watchable. It’s a disaster movie in more ways than one. Should you indeed look up, you may be surprised to find one A-list bomb of a movie, all inchoate rage and flailing limbs, falling right on top of you.
