Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate Dibiasky and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dr. Randall Mindy are excited to be the first to discover a massive new comet, which quickly turns to abject terror once they calculate its trajectory and discover it’s heading straight for us. So, it’s essentially a remake of Deep Impact.
The difference is, of course, while Deep Impact went on to discuss serious people preparing seriously for this serious event, Don’t Look Up is set in our current era of weaponised idiocy, and so their warnings that the planet is about to be pulverised in a mere six months is treated with mild interest at best, bumped on the news schedule behind the latest pop star gossip
Meryl Streep’s Janie Orlean, U.S.A President and unholy combination of Donald Trump and Sarah Palin, is similarly unfussed about this, opting for a wait-and-see strategy, at least until a suitably stupid scandal means a diversion is needed and a mission to explode the comet is launched, only to be aborted when a billionaire tech baron, Mark Rylance’s Peter Isherwell convinces Orlean to instead allow his company’s wild scheme to break it into smaller chunks in order to land it “safely” in the US and mine the precious minerals it is composed of. This goes as well as you might expect.
While all this is unfolding, Dr. Mindy finds himself becoming the government’s face for comet communications, a slowly boiling frog in the increasing outlandishness of first the refusal to act and then the wildly unconvincing response to it. Kate rather quickly recognises the inadequacy of the response and tries to raise an appropriate level of alarm, only to be mocked and proverbially run out of town, although once Dr. Mindy regains his critical faculties they have something of a reconciliation, agitating for action while the opposing forces deny there’s even a comet out there, urging people to think positively, and Don’t Look Up Boom Title Drop.
It is, much like writer/director Adam McKay’s prior work The Big Short, a satire of little subtlety. Now, in this instance, the hammerlike nature of it is very much the point, the film itself being a satire of the cloth eared, lead footed response to the our planet tearing itself apart in a bid to remove us pesky humans, a film that’s basically the embodiment of Jennifer Lawrence’s character.
However, that being the point of the film doesn’t excuse, well, the point of the film, and this does quickly feel like it’s repeating itself over and over. Not necessarily a problem if it remains funny, but, sadly, it doesn’t. I mean, it has its moments, but this is a comedy that is well north of two hours, and is at least three quarters of an hour too long.
That’s really my main issue with the film, sadly it’s a pretty critical one. There’s a fair amount in the theoretical positive column, from a batch of solid turns from a star-studded cast, and the production design is lavish and on point, and a lot of it is more believable than I’d wish.
But, well, bottom line is that it’s a comedy that’s not funny enough, no matter what your politics are. Indifferent out of five.