Adam McKay (2021)
Rarely can a movie race against time have turned into such a slog. At Michigan State University, astronomy research student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a new comet, just inside the orbit of Jupiter and heading Earthwards. Her supervisor, Professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), calculates that the comet will impact Earth in six months and eleven days, wiping out all life on our planet. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordinating Officer, Dr Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), confirms the calculations. When he, Mindy and Kate relay their dreadful findings to the White House, President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her son Jason (Jonah Hill), who is also her Chief of Staff, are unimpressed: for them, political chicanery is always a more urgent priority. When the scientists, in desperation, then leak their findings to the media and appear on a TV talk show, the hosts, Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) and Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry), treat the cataclysmic news light-heartedly: they’re more concerned with the latest showbiz stories. Don’t Look Up goes on for 138 minutes. Well before halfway, I was getting impatient for Comet Dibiasky to get its apocalyptic job done and ‘extinct’ (Kate’s verb) human life – or Adam McKay’s idea of it anyway.
Labelling the film science fiction is misleading in that this satirical-polemical comedy is an allegory of science fact. There’s a mismatch between the instant destruction threatened by the comet and the timeframe of the climate crisis that is Don’t Look Up‘s real concern but this is designed, of course, to stress the gravity of global warming. But McKay, who also wrote the screenplay (from a story devised with the journalist David Sirota), is too preoccupied with deriding people and the attitudes they represent to keep his eye on the ball. It says a lot about Don’t Look Up that, in the course of the half-year from the comet’s discovery until doomsday, there’s only one reminder (at twenty-five days to go) of how near the latter is getting. Instead, McKay spends his time and gets his kicks showing honest scientific warnings undermined by a tangled web of demagogue opportunism, ruthless big-business commercialism, social media madness, the tyranny of TV ratings, the siren call of celebrity, and so on. President Orlean changes her mind about the end-of-the-world threat when she sees it as a means of deflecting attention from a sex scandal involving her and her Supreme Court nominee. After she announces a project to launch nuclear weapons to strike the comet and alter its path, her approval ratings skyrocket, too. Orlean aborts the mission the moment that Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), billionaire CEO of tech company BASH and one of her top donors, intervenes to propose fragmenting the comet, which contains trillions of dollars-worth of commercially exploitable rare-earth elements. Anorak Mindy becomes a TV personality and heartthrob. As well as being literally seduced by Brie Evantee, he’s cajoled into working for the White House, advancing the case for Comet Dibiasky’s money-making potential.
This last thread feels anomalous in McKay’s plot (of which there’s much more but life really is too short …). Perhaps there are boffins who’ve sold their souls as Mindy does but the emphasis on his journey to the dark side runs counter to Don’t Look Up‘s key premise of scientific disinterestedness and integrity. (It’s less of a problem that the NASA chief (Hettienne Park) fails to support Oglethorpe’s findings because she, too, is an Orlean donor – she has no background in astronomy so was presumably a political appointment in the first place – but even this strikes an odd note.) The anomaly is more glaring because Leonardo DiCaprio plays Mindy as such a shrinking nerd you simply don’t believe he’d be unfaithful either to his wife (Melanie Lynskey) or his scientific calling. McKay, in any case, feels obliged to have Mindy eventually regret his folly and rejoin forces with Kate and Oglethorpe in a futile last-ditch social media campaign to save the planet. The other lead role is unsatisfactory in a different way. Outspoken Kate Dibiasky, unloved by TV audiences and on the receiving end of White House threats, retreats from the public eye: she abandons her studies and returns home to Illinois, where she gets a job in retail and starts a relationship with a quirky shoplifter (Timothée Chalamet). Jennifer Lawrence – who has laid the ground for a possibly involving portrait of a spiky millennial, infuriated by the ignorant self-interest of her elders – virtually disappears for most of the film’s second half. The parts McKay has written for the other three Oscar-winning actors in his starry cast don’t begin to test them – except in trying to resist the temptation of overcooking their performances. Cate Blanchett resists more successfully than Mark Rylance or Meryl Streep.
Don’t Look Up is evidently proving popular with audiences. It began streaming on Netflix on Christmas Eve and, according to Wikipedia, ‘set a new record for the most viewing hours in a single week on Netflix’. As well as pleasing Adam McKay devotees, the movie may also go down well with newcomers to his work, who don’t know, from the outset, what to expect. It might not have made a difference but I felt sorry I’d seen earlier McKays. If his film-making really is propelled by righteous anger, he’s doing an increasingly good job of concealing it. The tension between outrage and show-off sarcasm that sustained The Big Short (2015) was absent from the unrelenting lampoonery of Vice (2018). The main difference between that film and this new one is that Don’t Look Up is more slapdash. McKay’s proven taste for decorating the screen with jokey text and graphics is immediately in evidence but not for long. As well as a quote from the surrealist humorist Jack Handey (‘I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers’), there’s a Big Short-style explanation of a technical term but only the one. The film is announced as a BASH production (obviously before we know what BASH is going to signify in the story) but this isn’t followed through. Who knows why Rob Morgan’s decent character has the distracting name of Teddy Oglethorpe, which seems to come from a #MeToo-inspired mock-fest that McKay hasn’t yet got round to making, or why the egregious Janie Orlean shares a surname with Susan, the real, respected journalist played by the same actress in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002).
When the comet-fragmenting plan goes awry and disaster is about to strike, the powers-that-be – Orlean, Isherwell et al – escape the planet on a sleeper spaceship, though the president inadvertently leaves her son behind. Their departure paves the way for a mid-closing credits sequence, in which, ‘22,740 years later’, the escapees return to Earth, its Garden of Eden look reinforced by the nakedness of those alighting from their spacecraft. Orlean admires and tries to pet a large bird-like creature that promptly bites her head off. Earlier in the saga, Isherwell, boasting that BASH’s algorithms are advanced enough to plot every moment of everyone’s life and accurately predict their cause of death, informs Orlean that she’ll be killed by a Bronteroc. When she asks what that is, Isherwell doesn’t know. He does now: tying up this loose end seems to be the sole purpose of the epilogue. I switched off once the credits resumed but gather from Wikipedia that, after all have rolled, there’s another postscript with ‘Jason emerging from the rubble, having survived the comet, calling for his mother, and trying to post on social media using his phone’.
It’s a struggle to find things to say in the film’s favour. The titles appear in appealingly big, multi-coloured letters. There are spoof songs that work well enough though they’d be more effective in a comedy sketch show – a reminder that McKay’s career took off as a writer and director on Saturday Night Live. Yet the evidence suggests that Don’t Look Up has been greeted with enthusiasm by environmental scientists, in contrast to the film critics responsible for its green splat on Rotten Tomatoes. This difference of opinion is more striking than surprising – the all-publicity-is-good-publicity syndrome is reliable – but the scientists’ reaction is depressing, too. Wishful thinking that McKay’s lousy film really could make a difference must be a reflection of despair that more serious ways of exhorting media and public engagement with the climate crisis aren’t working. Anyone refusing to believe that Don’t Look Up will soon be forgotten – in less than six months and eleven days, I should think – is into their own form of denial.
8 January 2022
