Man . . . I timed this Molly perfectly.
So, wow, like where to even start with this? I guess the logline? Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists who discover that a comet is barrelling directly toward Earth and will trigger a mass extinction when it hits. The movie then “satirizes,” if that’s a thing you can do with a sledgehammer, the reactions of politicians, the media, the wealthy, tech companies and the mass public to this news. And it’s like . . . man, embarrassingly bad. Like truly terrible in a way that I kind of thought we had moved past. Like, yes, we still have bad movies. Sure. But this kind of massive ensemble, star-packed, high-concept vanity project seems like a relic of a bygone era. I think a great double feature would honestly be this movie and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, because they’re cut from the same cloth and feature the same near-hysteria emotional pitch and the comedy is just as broad and/or stupid, depending on how charitable you’re being to either film. Yes, it’s Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on the Climate Crisis and, really, if I wasn’t married to talking way more than I should about this stuff, that would really be a solid review of the movie right there.
Okay, let me just start with the cast, okay? Because, you know, I’m no fan of Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but you know what it did right? Realizing it was, you know, a comedy movie, it cast itself with . . . I mean, comedians. In Don’t Look Up we are treated to a comedy populated by a who’s who of respected dramatic actors and they. Just. Are. Not. Funny. Part of this is down to the material, yes. I suspect given the right material and a genuinely good actor’s director, some of these people are talented enough to be funny. But not here. DiCaprio’s doing a neurotic nerd routine that isn’t funny. Cate Blanchett isn’t funny as a maneating morning show host. Meryl Streep is on hand as the dimwitted President and she isn’t funny. Are you seeing a pattern emerge? About the only actual comedian here is Jonah Hill and he STILL ISN’T FUNNY. This is the least funny comedy I’ve seen in a decade.
But oh my God. I am baffled by the fact that there is one element of this movie that I am not hearing more people talk about. It is an element that makes all the other terrible elements of this movie kind of pale in comparison, at least the other performances. As bad as some of the other performances are, there is just nothing that holds a candle to the kind of acting terrorism that Mark Rylance is doing here. He is carpet-bombing this movie with absolute ****, some of the worst acting I have seen in a big budget movie maybe ever. His character is a CEO of a big tech company and I think his character is somewhat intended as a spoof of the sort of Steve Jobs/Elon Musk types. I mean, that’s now how he’s playing it. He isn’t playing it that way. I’m not entirely sure what he’s doing. He’s mincing about doing this wide-eyed innocent routine and speaking in a forced falsetto which . . .I don’t even know what he’s making fun of. Is he the flip side of Elizabeth Holmes? He’s always in white, she was always in black; he speaks in an annoying falsetto, she always spoke in basso profundo. Oh, Jesus Christ, I think I just cracked it, guys. Like right now while I’m typing. I think that might actually be it. He’s the photo-negative Elizabeth Holmes. Jesus Christ. This movie is literally getting worse while I’m reviewing it.
Anyway, yes, this movie is obviously about climate change, but it’s also just about a general culture of denialism, I think. Modern society has kind of made an art of just handwaving really awful and terrible things and going on as if they weren’t happening. That makes this movie also kind of a Pandemic movie and to some degree this is the same kind of thing McKay was talking about in The Big Short, a movie I still actually really like. But this movie is just so ham-fisted as to be annoying to me, someone who basically agrees with most of the points McKay is making. I can only imagine how “nails-on-a-chalkboard” shrill it is to someone who disagrees with him. This is similar to my experience with Vice, of course, and about halfway through this movie, I decided to start thinking about whether it was worse or better than Vice because the movie as it is wasn’t giving me anything to think about. And I have to say I think this one is maybe better as a movie than Vice was. McKay is still giving in to all of his meta tendencies here to some degree, but not to the degree he was in Big Short and Vice. Vice was really just a mess; Don’t Look Up is at least telling one story in a basically chronological way. It moves from point a to point b in an extremely labored, but still essentially logical, fashion. Of course, it doesn’t have Vice’s one virtue, a central genuinely great performance. So, you know, I’m still not exactly sure where I land when it comes to which one would I rather watch again. If you’re in that position, I guess just choose death or whatever.
But since I just gave this movie about as close to a compliment as it’s going to get from me (“it tells a story in chronological order lol”), I guess I could talk about the few things that are okay here. Jennifer Lawrence is good; she’s playing the closest thing to an actual human character in the movie. And her emotional arc over the movie is becoming ever more bitter and annoyed which is definitely an arc I empathized with. Timothee Chalamet is also genuinely good in the movie. He got one actual laugh out of me and I did find his character interesting in some ways. And you know what the best thing in the movie is? The score by Nicholas Britell. Britell’s a great composer, but I would never have predicted that a movie like this would have music that would even be remotely good. But I think the score has a strange kind of cosmic and melancholy feeling to it that I wish the movie had managed. Because again, the ideas here are not terrible.
I mean, I really did actually like the Thanksgiving Dinner scene at the end. I think that, ultimately, the movie has a good message. There’s time and effort to be spent on trying to make things better, but, the movie argues, there comes a point when focusing on the ones we love and our relationships with them is what matters. I will confess that I was actually emotionally moved by a couple of late moments in the film; Yule’s prayer is one of them and the other is the calm way DiCaprio just says, “We’re good,” when he's offered the chance to escape the Earth on a rocketship. I think ultimately the movie is saying something about finding a way to peace with our lives and DiCaprio’s final line, musing about how privileged his life really has been, is well-stated in my opinion. I really feel like that final ten minutes or so (pre-credits, I should say) actually kind of works and I wish that the preceding two hours of the movie hadn’t been so godawful. There’s a good movie in this premise, but this one isn’t it.
And, as if to underscore that point, the movie immediately undercuts a pretty solid ending scene with what really has to be the worst mid-credits scene in cinema history. And, look, the MCU is in Phase 4 now; we’ve seen some really bad ones. But the mid-credits scene really is just awful.
Anyway, I had a lot to say on this one and I’ve even jumped over some stuff I kind of wanted to say, but this is way more than enough time spent on this movie, an overly-ambitious, poorly written, poorly acted failure. I think the movie has some good intentions, but it ultimately ends up falling into the same traps it’s accusing everyone else of falling into. At the end of the day, this is a movie about things being really bad and people distracting themselves and lying to themselves and to others so that they can pretend things aren’t as bad as they really are. And, yes, that’s a fair critique of modern society, modern pop culture, politics, the media, etc. As it turns out, it’s also the final word on Don’t Look Up, a pitch-perfect example of the exact things it’s spoofing. 1 star.
tl;dr – misguided, poorly written/performed and often obnoxiously ham-fisted “satire” is a perfect example of the very things it’s mocking; there’s a good movie in this premise, but this ain’t it. 1 star.