Don't Look Up (2021)

Deep Impact on a Shallow Planet

or

The Dinosaurs Couldn't Say 'Told Ya So..."

 

A recent article in The Atlantic says that there are 21 million Americans who have no relationship to reality, wanting to re-instate Donald Trump as President of the United States, citing sheisters, Alzheimic Air Force Generals, and bad math to support their contentions. There's a bunch of Gen Z's who think birds are fake (they should get together with the folks who worry about chem-trails—there must be a connection because they're both in the AIR!) And we've always had Flat-Earthers because they've never been in a plane and figured out why the shortest distance to get to anywhere is not over the pole.

 

But, ask a farmer about global warming and they get serious.  Or a gardener. They've seen the time-shifts. They've seen annuals sprout too early. Crops lose their "window" and you compensate by shifting the planting earlier, risking the prospect of freezing. They know. You can't count on the Earth anymore. You can't count on anything...except maybe on one hand the number of friends you have that actually might be sane.

 

It used to be "If You Don't Stand For Something, You'll Fall for Anything." Now, with the internet the harder you stand, you'll fall even harder.

So, with that little sanctimony out of the way...what's the scoop on Don't Look Up, Adam McKay's look at "problem-solving" in a modern "connected" world?

 

McKay's conceit is to look at the "climate change" debate in a metaphorical way—what if we knew an "extinction-level" sized body was going to hit the Earth and we couldn't depend on our leaders, political or business, to save us for any reason?

Michigan State doctoral candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is spending a quiet night at an observatory studying trace gasses in dead galaxies for Astronomy Professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) when she sees something weird on the screen. It's a comet...and it's moving. Mindy is called and he and his grad students celebrate what will be the Dibiasky Comet, and start working the orbital path...when Mindy starts to get nervous and tells all the other students to go home. Except for Kate. She sees what he saw: that the comet is heading for Earth. It's 5-6 km long and it will hit Earth in 6 months and 14 days. Call it 26 weeks.

They call NASA, who conference calls them in with Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The link says it's real. And shit just got real; Oglethorpe mutters "that's a big boy" and then goes quiet when he realizes it signals "an extinction-level event." And while NASA advises caution, Oglethorpe orders a plane to bring Mindy and Dibiasky to the White House to tell the President. Dibiasky sees the Oval Office through an open door and grabs Mindy: "Are we really about to tell the President of the United States that we have just over six months until humankind—basically every species—is completely extinct?" Getting a shaky affirmative, she promptly throws up in an executive waste-basket. 

They're kept waiting for seven hours because the Executive Branch is in crisis mode: their nominee for Supreme Court justice has been revealed to be a pervert. Coming back the next day, they're given 20 minutes to explain what's going on and it doesn't go well: Mindy is nervously hyperventilating and that's off-putting to the coke-head Chief of Staff (Jonah Hill), who got the job because he's the President's son. The President (Meryl Streep) is a hot mess, unable to focus on the potential disaster for need of a smoke, and saying that the timing of this "is atrocious" (mid-terms). She cuts to the chase: "What's the 'ask' here?" "Save us" is the reply. The decision is made to have "her people" look into it and "Sit tight and assess."

The three scientists can't believe it—they only have six months—so, they decide to take it to the press, the Washington Herald, who sets up a segment on it at the end of "The Daily Rip" (hosted by shiny anchors played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett) after a segment on the disasterous Supreme Court pick and then on the break-up of two "important" pop stars (Ariana Grande and Scott Mescudi). Warned that they don't have "media training" Dibiasky and Mindy have trouble negotiating the happy banter of the hosts until Dibiasky cracks and melts down on-camera: "Are we not being clear? Maybe the destruction of the entire planet isn't supposed to be FUN! Maybe it's supposed to be terrifying." The hosts are affronted. That's just bad form. And bad television. Dibiasky becomes a snarky meme, and interest in the Herald's story on the internet drops like a comet from the sky. So, they stop covering it.

But, because they've gone on national TV with national secrets Dibiasky and Mindy are arrested by the FBI, and the White House has to scramble. President Orlean goes on television in an elaborately staged event on a naval vessel to announce an emergency spending bill to launch a space mission to try and blow up the comet—a space mission that is manned by a single astronaut (Ron Perlman) because "Washington needs a hero." All well and good until a cell-phone/tech pioneer, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), is told by his team that the comet is a source of Earth-depleted minerals that are critical for making cell-phones. The mission is scrubbed—he's a big donor to the President's campaign—and another mission is planned to break up the comet and have it's pieces fall into the Pacific so they can be recovered and resourced.

One sees the point: nobody is going to do anything about it while there's time enough for people to figure out a way to make money from it, because that's the only "killing" they're concerned about. If there was a way to take carbon out of the atmosphere that wasn't deemed fiscally expensive and would make a fortune, we'd be worrying, instead, that there was too much ice at the poles, rather than selling our waterfront property. Don't Look Up merely converts that to the disaster scenario of Armageddon—at times the movie looks like Michael Bay's "this would look great in a car commercial" style of film-making—or Deep Impact.

The satire veers all over the place, sometimes sharp (of course people wouldn't believe it until they saw it with their own eyes, and, of course, a television chat show would cock up such news and, of course, a screaming fit on-air is going to be dismissed and the stuff of internet jokes) and heavy-handed (the political stuff is baldly aimed at the last administration, with the difference being that the Orlean team look a bit more competent and decisive). It falls somewhere between Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy smart and Tropic Thunder dumb without ever achieving Dr. Strangelove brilliance. One grimly concedes McKay's aiming for the fences but he sometimes gets distracted by his own gee-wizardry and sarcastic weltschmerz to score a home-run.

Some of it is performance issues: Perry and Blanchett are rather one-note, but that seems appropriate for chat hosts. Hill's performance is as obnoxious as it's supposed to be, but Streep wears her tweet-hurt a bit too far, although it is reminiscent of Sarah Palin-subtlety. DiCaprio tries to achieve his Wolf of Wall Street comedic heights at times and falls short, but impresses in his dramatic scenes. Lawrence is terrific as the audience stand-in for expressing incomprehension and Rob Morgan stays out of comedy territory completely and frequently becomes a life-raft of reason. Best of all is Mark Rylance, who makes his tech entrepreneur suggestive but not an imitation, with just the right touch of Asperger's, child-like wonder, and child-like malice.

The reviews for Don't Look Up have been horrible, accusing McKay of condescension and being supercilious—social critics usually are—and there's a whiff of that here. But, there's also an earnestness that his heart is in the right place, if slightly broken, railing like a mad prophet to an ignoring, apathetic crowd. Despite the brickbats, I found myself enjoying it much more than I suspected I would, recognizing its weaknesses but appreciating the strengths.  

Now, about the message. Maybe by clothing "climate change" in a more direct disaster scenario is too subtle. There is a scene in the last season of "The Newsroom" ("Main Justice" Season 3 Episode 3) where there's an interview with a scientist from the EPA who has been prevented from issuing an alarming report about the environment (involving CO2 levels measured in Hawaii), and when asked to sum up the findings replies "a person has already been born who will die due to catastrophic failure of the planet" The anchor is taken aback and tries to walk it back to a less alarming conclusion, "Let's see if we can find a better spin...people are starting their weekends."

 

There isn't one. The only counter-argument is denial and that's just deflection and a stall to action. And we're doomed anyway. It's funny and it's a gut-punch. A sick joke that punches right in the nose.

 

On the much grander scale of things—pale blue dot-wise—cosmic catastrophes happen all the time—we just haven't heard about it since we haven't gotten television from there (yet)...because it's a messy Universe, despite all the space. We postulate the supernovas, the gravity collisions, but cannot grasp the implications, like imagining what happens to an ant colony when developing condo's. But, think of it in the "if Helen Keller fell down in a forest, would she make a sound" kind of way: "What if there was a cataclysmic event, and nobody did anything about it?"

 

The cosmic punch-line is "They deserved their fate."