'Don't Look Up' Heads to Theaters, Then Netflix
by EG
The climate change satire Don't Look Up has a big-name cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. It apparently also has Academy Awards aspirations, as it's heading to theaters this week for a limited run before settling in on Netflix on Christmas Eve. But is it any good? Read on for details.
In 1998, Earth braced for dueling annihilation events as Deep Impact and Armageddon hit multiplexes two months apart. Twenty-three years later, Hollywood is again sending an extinction-level comet hurtling through space toward us in Don’t Look Up. Those earlier films opted for earnest melodrama and big, dumb yippee-ki-kay heroics, respectively. It’s probably only fitting that in 2021 we get the end-of-the-world movie we deserve — a cynical, insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it. Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.
The movie will have a limited theatrical run from Dec. 10, ahead of its Dec. 24 Netflix bow, and no doubt some will find its easy digs at the indifference of a shamelessly self-dealing White House administration, the greed of a monolithic tech company, the vapidity of upbeat morning television and the outsize influence of social media quite hilarious. I did not.
“We’re at a point in human civilization where things are changing radically in ways that we can’t really understand in the moment,” says Adam McKay, pictured with the antique voting machines in the Hollywood offices of his production company, Hyperobject Industries.
Since rebranding from goofball comedies to Important Issues Satire with The Big Short and Vice, writer-director Adam McKay has specialized in movies far too pleased with themselves as they prompt audiences to feel superior to amoral conservatives, piously self-satisfied liberals and insatiably avaricious capitalists. What they don’t usually provide is depth, nuance or any sort of intelligent curiosity, generally opting to razzle-dazzle the viewer with lots of fast talk, smart-assy pseudo-cleverness and cartoonishly obvious characterizations.
This new feature takes those negatives to extremes that made me hostile to Don’t Look Up almost from the outset. The squandering of a dizzying assembly of marquee talent alone is aggravation enough. McKay drops in the famous joke by humorist Jack Handey near the start: “I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.” Would that this tiresome doomsday whoopee cushion contained something even half as witty.
Jennifer Lawrence plays Kate Dibiasky, a doctoral student in astronomy at a Michigan college, a character defined mostly by her two nose rings and razor-cut red bangs. She quietly sings “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit” while working, but we know right off that she’s smart and serious.
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.