Adam McKay’s really convinced he’s made the next Dr. Strangelove. His Netflix black comedy Don’t Look Up does have a number of that films’ hallmarks, particularly its’ use of a grave existential threat to humanity as a lightning rod for bleak political and social satire. Here he swaps out Cold War nuclear tensions with an imminent asteroid capable of extinguishing all life that is both a highly transparent and highly flawed metaphor for climate change. Both movies are responses to a visceral frustration with ignorant or irresponsible powers during times of heightened anxiety. The difference is that as expressed in Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick had little faith in the government, in authority, in figures of privilege –and directed his ire accordingly. McKay by contrast has no faith in humanity at all, save for a few isolated figures whose resistance is futile against a populace that can’t help but wantonly bring about their own destruction.
There is no surprise in this. It’s par for the course for McKay in the last several years to look down his nose at his audience, denigrate them for their ignorance and perceived ambivalence whilst gloating in his own ethical superiority. And if you think that’s all presumption, remember that a few months back McKay insinuated on twitter that critics lambasting this film either didn’t believe in or don’t care about climate change, recommending they “do some research”. It’s all black or white to him, nuance hardly matters, if you disagree with the method and efficacy of his points, you must be a bad person who thinks they have no validity whatsoever. This very smug, self-righteousness has perhaps cemented McKay as the most obnoxious filmmaker of the current Hollywood era, and Don’t Look Up is his greatest yet testament to his disdain for everybody and everything.
It begins when Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate Dibiasky, an astronomy PhD student, discovers a new large comet coming straight for Earth, ensuring devastation in about six months. She and scientist Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) endeavour then to get the word out for much of the films’ first act, meeting resistance every step of the way from a variety of sources. The most prominent is the office of the U.S. President, here a vain, corrupt populist played by Meryl Streep, whose idiot son (Jonah Hill) occupies a significant role in her administration -admittedly one of the more flavourful Trump analogues in recent years, though one that is pretty tepid in execution. While the flagrant racism is avoided, a lot of the Trump staples are still there: the sex scandals, the red hats, the billionaire associates, and that quasi-incestuous “if she wasn’t my daughter…” line quoted just about verbatim. The movie points out how politicians are in the pocket of their donors, how their actions are dictated on a partisan basis -President Orlean would rather wait to act on a crisis until after the mid-terms. But in all of this it doesn’t amount to much more than a Saturday Night Live-style pseudo-catharsis, pointing out what’s wrong in broad terms without any real insight or the guts to tackle the root causes of any of these issues.
And that’s the approach undertaken to every one of McKay’s targets, most of them treated with far more opaque subjectivity. His critique of the media consists of one shallow Good Morning America riff and a couple small glimpses of a Fox News-style alt-right propaganda network that is far too credible to reasonably count for satire. In these segments, McKay’s particular contempt for younger millennials and Gen-Zers rears its’ head as he casts the world of media superficiality and clickbait complacency as implicitly youth-oriented phenomenons. Their avatar is a vapid pop star played by Ariana Grande completely ill-at-ease at self-aware, self-effacing comedy, to whom most of the media is head over heels obsessed with. It’s all largely lazy stereotypes coloured in topical details that betray how McKay despite not really understanding the internet and vocally disparaging its’ use as a source of information, seems to live perpetually online, in those corners that give outsize impressions of certain segments of society at large.
It’s unfortunate because he almost gets it at times, he almost manages to pull off a decently cogent comment on a political point. For instance there’s everything around BASH, a conglomerate tech company run by a soft-spoken technocrat called Peter Isherwell and played by Mark Rylance in his latest bizarre attempt to seemingly prove he’s not that good an actor after all (the fake teeth he wears are hideously distracting and seem designed precisely for that purpose). Every so often the film comes close to smartly nailing some point about big tech or worker exploitation or even the billionaire space race -but seems to back away each time in favour of a more generic joke or statement about the tech industry or rich donors or I guess just antisocial weirdos (a smarter, bolder satire would have cast Isherwell as more explicitly a Zuckerburgian automaton, but these figures it seems afraid to offend specifically). Likewise where it comes to the more zeitgeist-heavy stuff: merely acknowledging anti-vaxxer rhetoric doesn’t say anything about it, and the way it tries to replicate meme culture is more awkward than even an alt-right shitposter. All of the social commentary is toothless as it tries to reach the broadest audience possible, while being a movie that is entirely preaching to the choir. No climate change sceptic is going to watch this, and it’s so blunt that they’re going to be even less inclined to change their mind if they do. Meanwhile those who would watch (typically politically centre-left viewers) are just being fed condescending validation of their predetermined assumptions and doomerism.
What’s sad in this is that McKay is at least trying to tell a resonant story. It may be better than Vice if only because it acknowledges that rational people exist -the scientists. They and their frustration is relatable, and I won’t deny the satisfaction when they have an outburst about the gravity of the situation. But at the same time it’s kind of worse that they’re drawn this way because they exist in a world far more cynical and dystopian than our own -where the response to the asteroid is split between people not believing in it and people thinking it’ll bring jobs (there are rich minerals in it apparently). Meanwhile there’s not a hint of a sizeable populace that does believe the scientists or is responding responsibly, because that would mean the movie admitting the world is actually worth saving. And McKay’s thesis is that it is not, at least not for the human race.
That’s ultimately the chief reason why Don’t Look Up fails. It approaches its’ material from a place of pure derision and a scorched earth mentality, with no interest in seriously interrogating it. By contrast, look to the best satire of the modern age: Sorry to Bother You directs its’ rage in smart and creative ways at the root causes of its’ societal frustrations, whilst using the tools of satire to de-legitimatize on multiple fronts the systems that create the problem. But instead of attacking systems or even politics, this film would much rather attack people, because that’s easier. Don’t Look Up posits it is the people themselves that are the problem and not structures maintained by a minority of the powerful.
And in addition to this, it’s also just not that competent or passionate. The movie doesn’t say anything that sensible folks don’t already understand and even lament, and much like McKay’s other works it just nihilistically basks in the stupidity, recklessness, and indifference of essentially all levels of society. It’s a movie designed to show how bad everybody is, how hopeless the fight against climate change is, and yet at the same time how smart and radical McKay is for pointing this all out. All the while being a showcase for a slew of performances ranging from middling to embarrassing from some of the industry’s top talents. A miserable movie with maybe a total of five decent jokes that compounds that with relentless misanthropy and defeatism, it’s bad satire that only serves to stroke McKay’s ego in the guise of delivering an altruistic message. The urgency of the climate crisis deserves a better outlet.
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