Don’t Look Up

Film­mak­ers have been wrestling with the cli­mate cri­sis for some time now. In Feb­ru­ary 2022, it will be 15 years since Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s An Incon­ve­nient Truth won Best Doc­u­men­tary at the Oscars; lit­tle progress (if any) has been made since then. In 2018 the UN warned we had 12 years to lim­it the cat­a­stro­phe; this past Novem­ber, the COP26 sum­mit was deemed a fail­ure by many crit­ics. It’s under­stand­able, then, that Adam McK­ay, who piv­ot­ed to polit­i­cal film­mak­ing in 2015 with his scathing take on the 2007-08 finan­cial melt­down, The Big Short, might use his plat­form for a noble, urgent cause.

Under­stand­able, too, is the impulse from Leonar­do DiCaprio to front such a project; he estab­lished his own envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness foun­da­tion in 1998, and used his Best Actor Oscar accep­tance speech in 2016 to high­light cli­mate change, not to men­tion pro­duc­ing eight doc­u­men­taries around the sub­ject and nar­rat­ing two of them. But can a star-stud­ded satire about immi­nent plan­e­tary death lead to mate­r­i­al change, or does it land in the same way as a telling-off from a cool headteacher?

McKay’s alle­go­ry sees a PhD Astron­o­my stu­dent named Kate Dib­i­asky (Jen­nifer Lawrence) dis­cov­er a comet while study­ing under Dr Ran­dall Mindy (Leonar­do DiCaprio). While her dis­cov­ery is ini­tial­ly cause for cel­e­bra­tion with­in the Michi­gan State astron­o­my depart­ment, the pair soon realise the comet is on a direct col­li­sion course with Earth and that the impact will cause a mass extinc­tion event.

In an attempt to warn the world, they are joined by Dr Clay­ton Oglethor­pe from NASA’s Plan­e­tary Defense Coor­di­na­tion Office, who takes their con­cerns all the way to girl­boss madam pres­i­dent, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep). A tug-of-war ensues between sci­en­tists, politi­cians and busi­ness­men (notably Mark Rylance’s tech mag­nate Peter Ish­er­well, mod­elled after Steve Jobs and Elon Musk) as each strives to pro­tect their inter­ests, and Dr Mindy quick­ly finds him­self enam­oured with the prospect of becom­ing a celebri­ty scientist.

This top-line syn­op­sis bare­ly scratch­es the sur­face when it comes to the celebri­ties packed into the film’s 138-minute run­time. Jon­ah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Ari­ana Grande, Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met, Tyler Per­ry and Ron Perl­man all have cameos, with mixed results: Cha­la­met shines as a nihilis­tic gamer (he should do more com­e­dy) but Grande’s turn as a vapid pop star adds pre­cious lit­tle apart from her name on the poster.

It feels more like an exer­cise in attach­ing stars to a cause than a suc­cess­ful ensem­ble cast, and while DiCaprio is charm­ing as the schlub­by sci­en­tists seduced by celebri­ty, Lawrence feels ill-cast as the ground­ed out­sider speak­ing truth to pow­er even though the role was writ­ten for her espe­cial­ly. A romance between her char­ac­ter and Chalamet’s is cringe-induc­ing in how forced it feels, while Meryl Streep, for all her many tal­ents, is just not a nat­ur­al come­di­an. It’s a shame McK­ay has moved away from cast­ing come­di­ans and tra­di­tion­al­ly com­ic actors, because a cast with a bet­ter sense of rhythm and tim­ing might have been able to sell this clunky script a lit­tle more gracefully.

McKay’s styl­is­tic flour­ish­es (use of title cards, inter­spersed image sequences rem­i­nis­cent of the Ludovi­co Tech­nique sequence in A Clock­work Orange) remain dis­tract­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the pres­ence of so many stars. Even Nicholas Britell’s score feels over­whelmed by the con­stant bom­bard­ment of images, as if McK­ay is afraid to real­ly let the film breathe. It’s only in the film’s final scene – which is maybe its best – that there’s any feel­ing of dra­mat­ic res­o­nance, and even this is under­mined by a slap­stick post-cred­its sequence.

The film does suc­ceed in por­tray­ing the luna­cy of recent times, how­ev­er, and although the main thrust is how world lead­ers con­tin­ue to turn a blind eye to cli­mate change in order to cling to rev­enue streams and polling num­bers, it’s a handy insight into the polit­i­cal divides dur­ing the Covid pan­dem­ic as well.

Streep’s pres­i­dent is clear­ly mod­elled after Trump, which is fun­ny up to a point, but also feels like too con­ve­nient a get-out, as if all we can do is spi­ral into dark­ness while our elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives con­tin­u­al­ly fuck us over. It’s not like things have been marked­ly bet­ter since Trump retreat­ed into the shad­ows; the mad­den­ing inac­tion of elect­ed offi­cials is now seclud­ed behind closed doors, rather than played out on the POTUS Twit­ter account.

The thing is, it all feels a lit­tle tooth­less. While McKay’s pre­vi­ous film, Vice, ascribed every West­ern evil of the past 20 years to Dick Cheney, Don’t Look Up doesn’t ascribe much blame or respon­si­bil­i­ty, or even offer a phoney quick-fix end­ing. In fact, it doesn’t have much at all to say about the cli­mate dis­as­ter beyond a shrug­ging ​‘well, this sucks, but we still have each other!’

Per­haps this is an indi­ca­tion that we shouldn’t look (up) to celebri­ties for any sort of answer or sal­va­tion. But what do you do when celebri­ties are friends with the busi­ness execs who rav­age the dwin­dling resources we have left to line their bank accounts? When celebri­ties are politi­cians, the very peo­ple with the pow­er to enact glob­al change? McK­ay doesn’t seem to have an answer for that.