Earth faces certain doom when humanity can't get its head out of its collective ass in 2021's Don't Look Up. Co-written by Bernie Sanders' speechwriter David Sirata and co-written and directed by ardent Sanders supporter Adam McKay, the film unsurprisingly presents a distinctly partisan social and political satire. Meryl Streep plays a combination of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, a shallow, self-absorbed American president presiding over a shallow, self-absorbed population. It's cynical and about as subtle as a gorilla in a fish tank. But lead performances by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence bring a real sense of humanity to what might otherwise have been just a long SNL sketch.
DiCaprio plays an astronomer, Randall Mindy, and Lawrence is his PhD student, Kate Dibiasky. It's Kate who first spots the fateful comet, the one Mindy soon calculates will collide with Earth, destroying the planet. Mindy already takes medication for anxiety and depression so the burden of this knowledge is especially difficult for him. I thought a little of DiCaprio's performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as his character's psychological issues threaten continually to derail him in front of the camera.
Despite seeming to be very obviously important news, the dire information Mindy and Kate bear about the comet cannot penetrate the attentions of a president and news media who are comically obsessed with celebrity relationships. Some of it is funny. I liked a recurring bit where Kate wonders why a U.S. general charged her and a few other people for free snacks and water. But so much of the comedy relies on sharing an impression of the media with McKay and Sirota.
At one point, a supporter of Streep's President Orlean (so a villain) decries the attempt by certain people in the media, like Dr. Mindy, to endlessly sound an alarm for impending peril. The idea apparently being that anyone who says the media actively tries to scare you is a quack. This seems especially tone deaf in the Covid era but I doubt there's anyone with any acquaintance with western media who isn't aware of the fact that headlines about disaster and disease have been used to garner views and clicks for decades. Which cuts significantly into the central premise of the film--one senses it really wouldn't be so difficult for Mindy and Kate to find a platform eager to trumpet their message.
It may have been intended as an allegory for climate change, something many viewers seem to have assumed with full confidence. Yet the differences between the sudden appearance of a comet from space and the gradual, global, human created phenomenon of climate change are too crucial to make this allegory in any way meaningful. In the end, the film just feels like embittered Sanders supporters grinding axes and the glimpse into how they've imagined the world turned against them is almost as sad as the doom that plays out for Mindy and Kate.
Don't Look Up is available on Netflix.
Twitter Sonnet #1511
In tin he sits awaiting steps to stars.
To sell the world he passed the monster self.
He saw the changes take the mouse to Mars.
Then spiders broke the fly and drank his health.
The glowing bonds would fain disguise the heat.
A pacing wolf remains beside the snack.
A diff'rent bike was placed below the Beat.
A random word described the student's pack.
A certain phone determined night and day.
The scratching tipped the neighbour's hand to go.
There's something else the pigeon chose to say.
There's fewer clerks because the night is slow.
Machines of candy beaks deposit birds.
Divided seas will drown a billion worlds.
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