What holds Don't Look Up together is the witty and hard-hitting core of McKay's screenplay.Īgainst the backdrop of a pandemic that refuses to go away and an ever-worsening global warming scenario, the points that the scathing satire makes are unfailingly relevant and urgent. That is clearly a part of the narrative design. At first flush, the tone of the film wavers a bit, going back and forth between the subtle and precise to the superficial and wacky. In the line of the film's fire are power-crazed politicians, corporate czars and co-opted scientists peddling their convenient delusions to a crowd lulled and manipulated through news cycles aimed at achieving collective complacency and complicity. With a cast to die for (Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Timothee Chalamet, Mark Rylance and, what's more, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep), Don't Look Up, out on Netflix, hits the right buttons, pulls no punches and lands quite a few stinging jabs bang on target. Still, congrats to McKay for making a movie this depressing and relevant for the holidays.The end of the world is certainly no laughing matter but in the star-studded Don't Look Up, writer-director Adam McKay sees the funny side of a looming disaster without ever losing sight of the sobering reality of mankind's indifference to the threats that the planet faces. Don't Look Up wants us to save the world before it's too late, though the people that need to see the movie the most will be the ones fastest to dismiss it. I don't think the movie quite achieves the poignancy it's aiming for by the end of its 138 minutes, but the anger is veritably felt. If you're the right audience, that one joke will be sufficient. The satire is bracingly blunt but also one joke on repeat. In some ways, the dark laughter the movie inspires is cathartic after years of COVID denials and mask tirades and horse medicine. It's less Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, exploring the foibles of humans reconciling their last moments of existence, and more Idiocracy, where there is a lone voice of reason and the rest of the population are aggravating morons that refuse to accept reality even if it literally means just looking up with their own eyes. This is the bleakest movie of McKay's foray into his more sober, activist movie-making (The Big Short, Vice). I laughed at several points, some of it good cackling, and the movie is dark to its bitter end. It's about choosing ignorance and greed, about deferring to our worst instincts, and those in power who profit from inaction. It's fit as a climate change allegory but COVID-19 or any scientific crisis could be applied as well. This movie is animated with seething rage about the state of the world and the cowardice about facing obvious problems head-on. It makes a person want to stand up and scream about priorities, and that's McKay's point, one that will be bludgeoned again and again. Not the media where morning TV co-hosts (Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry) are more compelled by music star breakups than pressing science. Not the greedy CEO (Mark Rylance) of a tech company. Not the president (Meryl Streep) and her inept chief of staff/son (Jonah Hill). Jennifer Lawrence plays a doctoral student who discovers a comet heading for direct cataclysmic impact with Earth, and she and her astronomy mentor (Leonardo DiCaprio) are trying to sound the alarm but nobody seems to be listening. Rating: R (Graphic Nudity|Drug Content|Language Throughout|Some Sexual Content)Ī scorched Earth satire that flirts with a literal scorched Earth, Don't Look Up is writer/director Adam McKay's star-studded condemnation of everything stupid and myopic in media, politics, and pop culture. With only six months until the comet makes impact, managing the 24-hour news cycle and gaining the attention of the social media obsessed public before it's too late proves shockingly comical - what will it take to get the world to just look up?! Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), Kate and Randall embark on a media tour that takes them from the office of an indifferent President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her sycophantic son and Chief of Staff, Jason (Jonah Hill), to the airwaves of The Daily Rip, an upbeat morning show hosted by Brie (Cate Blanchett) and Jack (Tyler Perry). Turns out warning mankind about a planet-killer the size of Mount Everest is an inconvenient fact to navigate. The other problem? No one really seems to care. The problem: it's on a direct collision course with Earth. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) make an astounding discovery of a comet orbiting within the solar system. Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student, and her professor Dr.
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