Movie Review - Don't Look Up (2021)

Adam McKay is an Oscar-winner for The Big Short (2015), which was about the 2007-2008 financial crisis with a satirical and comedic eye to the whole situation. He was nominated for writing and directing Vice (2018), which was about Vice President Dick Cheney and his rise to power, again with a satirical and comedic eye. This film is presumably about climate change and how it was handled under President Donald Trump. The difference between this film and McKay's previous Oscar-nominated features is that this film feels more metaphorical and ridiculously over-the-top, which is what a satire often does. Yet, it seems as if McKay directed The Big Short and even Vice as if they were straight-forward dramas. There were obvious comedic bits in both those films, but they both could arguably be considered straight biopics. Christian Bale in both The Big Short and Vice feels like he was directed to play the whole thing seriously and straight. That doesn't feel like the case for the main actor here or for any of the actors.

Leonardo DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street and The Revenant) stars as Randall Mindy, a professor at Michigan State University. He specializes in astronomy. He realizes that a large comet is headed toward Earth. The comet is so large and is traveling so fast that if it hits the Earth, it will completely destroy all life on the planet. Randall then has to go to the President and eventually to the media in order to convince the masses of people that this comet isn't a hoax and that science supports it. The comet is obviously a metaphor for climate change. Strangely, it could also be a metaphor for the coronavirus, but given that DiCaprio is such an activist against climate change in his personal life, it's likely that the metaphor is climate change here. It's not clear if DiCaprio is playing a character based on a real person, unlike Bale in both The Big Short and Vice. This allows DiCaprio to be a bit sillier and over-the-top and that's exactly how he is.

Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook and Winter's Bone) also stars as Kate Dibiasky, a Ph.D candidate at Michigan State University who works with Randall. She also specializes in astronomy. She's the one who actually discovers the comet. She tells Randall about it and calculates its collision course with the Earth. She tags along with him, as he goes to Washington, DC, and presumably Manhattan to try to convince people of the pending danger and total destruction. Unlike Randall, she's not as socially awkward and as anxious. She immediately loses her cool and loses her temper very quickly, which causes the media to backlash against her really soon. She becomes rather defeated before the whole thing starts.

Meryl Streep (Mamma Mia! and The Devil Wears Prada) co-stars as President Janie Orlean, the current president of the United States, a woman who looks like she could be the equivalent of Hillary Clinton, and in some ways she is, but it becomes obvious fairly quickly that she's the equivalent of Donald Trump. She's wealthy, entitled, privileged and seems to appeal to white supremacists, while trying to be a populist. Yet, she's also low-key very Clinton-esque in that she's swayed and only does certain things based on polls and based on how the wind blows and not necessarily due to principle, which is in general how most politicians are. Trump isn't a person who cared much about polls. He was more egotistical. Streep's performance is probably a combination of both Clinton and Trump.

One hears that a comet is coming to destroy the Earth and one might conjure up images of Armageddon (1998) or Deep Impact (1998). This film keys up for things to go that route, but where it goes instead feels more in line with Melancholia (2011) and Take Shelter (2011). Both those 2011 independent films are about how people handle a pending apocalyptic event. In Melancholia, it's about people in denial until the inevitable end. Take Shelter is about people who are ignoring a man whose warnings seem crazy or in the vein of Chicken Little.

It was interesting that I did see a parallel between this film and DiCaprio's most successful film, Titanic (1997). Like that Oscar-winning blockbuster, this film is also about people being in danger from a large chunk of something hitting and having a collision that causes massive damage. In Titanic, that large chunk was an iceberg. Here, it's a comet, which ironically can also be a kind of iceberg in space. It's mostly a huge rock though. What James Cameron realized though that Adam McKay doesn't is the heart at its center. Titanic had heart at its center. This film doesn't. The film tries with Randall's family, including his wife and sons, but the film doesn't do enough with that.

Rated R for language, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 18 mins.

Available on Netflix.