![]() ![]() The attempts to make that point, however, careen wildly in different directions, from a tech billionaire (Mark Rylance, adopting a not-of-this-world accent) who sees opportunities to cash in on the comet’s natural resources to the president’s chief of staff (Jonah Hill), who can only see the threat in terms of how it might impact the midterm elections. McKay and Sirota deliver a spot-on attack on how easily distracted people (especially in media) are, fixating on Kate’s hair and clothes and ignoring the substance of her message. After fruitless back and forth, she concludes that they’ll “sit tight and assess” the situation.įrom there, “Don’t Look Up” is off to the races with a scathing indictment of everything about our media and political ecosystem, from the happy-talk news show (anchored by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett, standing out as especially self-absorbed TV anchors) to websites preoccupied with traffic and social-media memes. Understandably alarmed, their findings quickly reach the White House, where the president (Meryl Streep, poorly served by the ridiculousness of her character) is too preoccupied with her endangered Supreme Court pick to focus on what Randall describes as an extinction-level event. student Kate Dibiasky ( Jennifer Lawrence) discover the comet, whose trajectory will lead to a direct collision with Earth in a little over six months. The window into that absurdity comes when astronomy professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his PhD. The title reflects the inevitable endpoint of that, with a bury-your-head-in-the-sand approach to impending doom. Yet this star-studded, extremely provocative satire at times veers off course itself, partially undermining its admirable qualities with the broadness of its tone.Īt its core, writer-director Adam McKay (who wrote the script with journalist/activist David Sirota) delivers a very pointed treatise on the dysfunctional state of current politics and media, in which everyone is so myopic as to be unable to focus on an existential threat. ![]() In a grand science fiction tradition, “Don’t Look Up” uses a disaster-movie framework as a metaphor for a reality-based crisis, with a huge comet hurtling toward Earth as a surrogate for indifference to addressing climate change.
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