Don’t Look Up
Directed by Adam McKay
Screenplay by Adam McKay
Story by Adam McKay & David Sirota
Produced by Adam McKay & Kevin Messick
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi, Himesh Patel, Melanie Lynskey, Michael Chiklis, Tomer Sisley, Paul Guilfoyle, Robert Joy, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep
When it comes to dark comedy, you just can’t beat plots that involve massive comets coming right at Earth. Lucifer’s Hammer had scenes like a surfer riding a mile-high tsunami through the office buildings of Santa Monica. You, Me and the Apocalypse was one of the most brilliantly funny social satires I’ve ever seen.
We can add Don’t Look Up to that list. The plot starts out simple. A doctoral candidate (Jennifer Lawrence) is doing a sky survey for extinct galaxies in hopes of determining the composition of the outgassing of such an event. Quite by chance, she takes a series of observations that captures a comet around the orbit of Jupiter that she excitedly shows her mentor (Leonardo DiCaprio). He uses the images to plot the orbital trajectory of the object and discovers it’s headed right at Earth, with a 98+% possibility of direct impact.
They have an acquaintance, Oglethorpe (Robert Joy) who has enough clout to get them an audience with the US President Orlean (Meryl Streep, doing a hilarious mashup of Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor-Green, Lauren Boebert and Sarah Palin). Their first clue that this isn’t the administration of The West Wing comes when a US General charges them $20 for a bottle of water and a bag of chips. They later learn that such items are usually provided for free for White House guests.
It goes downhill from there. The President clearly thinks news that we’ll all be dead in six months might hurt her party in the midterms.
Stunned, the three try to get their message out to the public directly, with the sort of horrifying results you might expect from the vehicles of cable news and social media.
The satire is somewhat heavy-handed, bordering on anvilicious, but is razor sharp and dead on target. The title comes from a movement, enthusiastically endorsed by the president, to deny that the comet even exists, but is a fear mongering tactic by liberals, the media, Israel or the insurance companies to make people afraid. In an unforgettable scene, Ron Perlman, the Hero Astronaut sent on an aborted mission to blow up the comet, realizes it is real and stands in his backyard, firing at the comet with a semi automatic.
As a glance at the cast shows, there is no lack of acting ability. Fifteen years ago I would have dismissed this movie as utterly ridiculous and unrealistic, but since then we’ve gone through Trump, Facebook and QAnon, or perhaps they went through us. Now, the situations laid out are all too real. The trick was to get people laughing instead of hanging themselves, and the movie does an extraordinary job managing that.
Now on Netflix.