Don't Look Up
NETFLIXNever asking how worried audiences are about the shaky environmental situation, the latest feature from Adam McKay, Don’t Look Up, is a star-studded collection of ideas and thoughts. It is little more than that: a scatterbrain offering from a smart and sometimes refined mind. McKay and this rigid ensemble should be up to the task of giving brief answers to the big and topical questions, it is why they’ve been given 140 minutes to mull it over and come up with something that would be beyond “fine,” yet they can’t manage that. They’re not up to the task of consolidating ideas of political classes crashing against the real needs of mother Earth, and when they get close, they do it in the most fundamentally dull way possible.
The rich will make their way to the next stage of glamourous living and leave the working class behind. It’s hard to take such a message seriously from behind the curtain of consumerist networks like Netflix. McKay misses the mark anyway, unlike the asteroid hurtling towards his glossy ensemble where two scientists are failing to convince anyone of its disastrous effects. Humans are nothing in the grand scale of the cosmos. At least that message slides through the slop of this tangled nonsense. Performances can’t matter all that much, even if Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and the rest of this incredible ensemble are offering fine enough work. They are buoyed by their natural abilities, rather than drivel in the dialogue and the obvious comparisons to current events.
A smug showcase through the environmentally worrying times ahead, Don’t Look Up has a big, bold cast and not much else. Those comparisons to the real world are necessary, but they make little difference when handled with so much egregious, middle-class care. Meryl Streep plays the President in parody, running on a slogan that shares its title with the film. “They want you to look up, because they’re looking down their noses at you,” President Janie Orlean (Streep) says to her crowds and crowds of believers. The irony there is that McKay looks down at his audience. Intentional or not, his sights are set on the high and mighty task of boasting about the importance of environmentalism without acting upon his own words. It is do-gooding without the “doing” that precedes the good times.
Smug and nihilistic of the usual paste grey flavour, Don’t Look Up is the pop-commercial viability of the socially active celebrity spilling over into the quasi-real-life formula. But that is exactly what it is. Formula. Formula for something far more important, but ego takes hold and star power deflate a beating heart message of poignant urgency. Don’t fear environmentalism, it’s all about self-actualisation and the unenviable task of putting down that phone. McKay directs this feature with all the thought-out and earnest intentions of an elderly relative whining that teens these days spend too much time on “the TikTok, instant-gramming their buddies” when back in their day it was all about a respected environment and conscription and scarlet fever. The good old days. Don’t Look Up is an ineffective insult that uses a bloated cast to pilfer through a poignant message with little to no effect.