JUST WATCHED: Don't Look Up

Look! There’s Turk on the left! Man, that guy gets around.

I’m writing about this not because I think this was a stellar movie. It’s that I’m still thinking about it a couple of days later. Hm. For some folks, that’s the marker for a good movie, your mileage may vary. This movie is difficult to discuss in order to avoid spoilers. I think the only thing I can be specific about is how disturbing I found the entire affair to be.

Now, I’m not a big fan of Adam McKay. In fact, I didn’t really know who he was when I watched the movie. You could show me a photo of McKay and some other animal side-by-side and I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which was which. Here’s a photo of McKay next to a donkey. Like a web bot, I can’t tell if the dude is on the left or the right.

No idea which is which… I looked McKay up, however, and, lo, he has made several recognizable and recognized movies. Mostly comedies. Some I even found funny. He’s the one on the left. I think.

Anyway, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence portray protagonists Dr. Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiaski. Mindy is an astronomy professor and Dibiaski one of his PhD candidates. She discovers a particularly large comet and together they determine that it’s on a collision course with Earth. An apocalyptic event that’s forthcoming in the next six months (and fourteen days). What follows is their experience trying to get society to take the matter seriously. It is funny. I especially enjoyed a couple of running gags involving the comet being named after Dibiaski and the FBI/CIA’s use of restraint hoods. Overall, for me, it was disturbing horror after horror. From the President of the United States, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), to her number one political donor, tech-giant CEO Peter Isherwell (a spot-on performance by Mark Rylance), the film is littered with big-name actors as societal archetypes that absolutely nail their parts. Horrifically. One might assume that DON’T LOOK UP is a liberal-slanted parody of life as we know it and one would be wrong. It’s a comedy first, in that there are plenty of jokes that land, but it’s also depressing and dark as fuck when all is said and done. I’ll call the movie a warning against the possibility of a media-savvy personality actually being in charge of saving people. We already have this challenge with political leaders unwilling to simply help society in general. But save us from some horrible shit? Nah, bro, hashtag, tho, and profits. Again, we’ve seen how this has played out with the pandemic and climate change. The selfish, sociopathic, sad, sycophantic, pandering, and addictive behaviors on display throughout the movie mirror what we experience day-to-day in America—and somehow this country remains one of the wealthiest in the world. The message I took from this movie was that it might be in our collective best interests to give a damn about each other, just a little, before it’s too late.

I usually watch movies to escape what passes for reality. This flick amps up our collective shortcomings and shortsightedness, then lets nature take its course right to the finale. There are bright spots in the ending, however, scenes that I would consider a triumph of humanity where it counts. Satisfying stuff. Stick around for the after-credits scene, as well. It’s as too-on-the-nose as the rest of the movie, but still morbidly entertaining and exemplary of the kind of thinking that predominates our aggressively political society nowadays.