Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Don’t Look Up’ on Netflix, in Which Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence Fight the Good Fight Against Nihilism

Netflix’s star-spangled Don’t Look Up is the new comedy from Adam McKay, the filmmaker who famously shifted from goofball Will Ferrell comedies that are easy to love (Anchorman, Step Brothers) to withering, self-referential political satires (The Big Short, Vice) that are considerably more divisive. For the new film, McKay ropes in Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence to play scientists trying to tell the world about a “planet-killing” comet that’s comin’ right for us, and Meryl Streep as the POTUS who’s more concerned about the polls than armageddon. Cate Blanchett, Jonah Hill, Ariana Grande, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry and Timothy Chalamet also turn up for this theoretically hilarious final hallelujah for Planet Earth – now let’s see if the movie’s a distracting celeb parade, or more than the sum of its many very famous parts.

DON’T LOOK UP: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Kate Dibiasky (Lawrence) is about to have an apocalyptic comet named after her: Does it get any better than that? She’s a PhD candidate at Michigan State University who spots the 9km-wide astral body in the Oort cloud, and her associate, Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio), is the astronomer who calculated its trajectory, a 99-point-something-something percent probability of it slamming into the Pacific off the coast of Chile and quickly extinguishing all life on Earth. Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) is a fed scientist who gets them an audience with President Janie Orlean (Streep) and her failson/chief of staff Jason (Hill). Prior to the meeting, Kate and Randall are so nervous, she pukes in a White House trash can and he pops a Xanax as they’re stared down by a painted portrait of Nancy Reagan. At this point, we get to watch the opening credits, which run deep with big Hollywood names. You’ve gotta take note of the “with” credits that come at the tail-end of such credits; when the “with”s are Streep and Blanchett, you know you’re watching a MOVIE.

When Kate, Randall and Teddy finally get face time with Madam President, we take note of the pictures in the Oval Office: Big portrait of Nixon, snapshots of her with Steven Seagal and Bill Clinton. Randall tells her that a “planet killer” comet with the strength of “a billion Hiroshima bombs” will destroy Earth in six months, and she says they just have to “sit tight and assess” the situation. Why should she listen to two schmoes from Michigan State University? She has Ivy Leaguers to consult, and midterm elections to worry about. Miffed, our intrepid and earnest protags decide to go to the press, knowing for absolute certain that their intrepid and earnest pleas will take precedence over the sensational breaking story about the Supreme Court justice nominee that was not only a nude figure model in college, but also Orlean’s secret lover. Meanwhile, we meet Peter Isherwell (Rylance), a buh-buh-buh-billionaire cell phone magnate with just the most radiant fake teeth you’ve ever seen. He’ll play a role in all this, because he’s the third-richest person in the world. Elsewhere, life goes on. A gecko molts. A hummingbird sups on nectar. A New York City sanitation dept. worker tosses rubbish.

Randall and Kate get booked for a news-chat show whose two hosts (Blanchett and Perry) can’t take anything seriously, especially the end times. Randall becomes the “sexy astronomer” on magazine covers, while Kate’s tearful and angry plea gets her meme’d within a millimeter of her sanity. He gets swept up in the hoopla, and she gets stepped on, but they still stump heavily for science and reason and rationality to whoever will listen, which is basically nobody. The POTUS eventually comes around; a plan to deflect the comet with nukes is derailed; the cell phone guy exerts his influence; Kate starts kissing a boy (Chalamet) who’s very sweet and sensitive even though he looks like he hops trains. Somewhere, bull elephant seals, clueless to their impending doom, fight over a female. Humpback whales hump. A mother hippo honks at its cub. Cub? Calf? Calf. It’s calf.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Don’t Look Up is the scene in Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds where Werner Herzog says that scene in Deep Impact is beautiful crossed with Vice crossed with Idiocracy. It wishes it was the 21st century Dr. Strangelove, but it’s not.

Performance Worth Watching: This is a tough one. There are so many stars in this movie! So I’m gonna go with the baby hippo.

Memorable Dialogue: Kate’s hot take on the White House: “We gotta get outta here. This place is a freak show.”

Sex and Skin: Some brief frontal and back-al nudity; a very quick snippet of a couple having end-times nookie.

Our Take: So many people living on Don’t Look Up’s version of Earth are so infuriating, it’s not hard to be Team Comet. We’ll feel bad for the few good, flawed-but-worthy people who tried to do the right thing – Kate, Randall, Teddy, Randall’s sweet and patient wife (Melanie Lynskey) – but in the long run, the planet’s destruction is better for the universe. About a third of the way into the movie, its cynical fatalism kicks in, and we either saddle up for its ya-hoo nuclear-missile ride into annihilation, or grow weary of its conspicuous overtures, which add up to one big, loud, conspicuous metaphor for climate change that’s being howled a quarter-inch from our faces. Subtle, it is not.

But is it funny? Yeah, it’s funny. McKay’s screenplays are always good for several big laughs, and the gaudy procession of Hollywood VIPs can be entertaining. Yet it’s diminishing returns for McKay’s The World is F—ed trilogy – The Big Short’s crisp, devilish slashing apart of Wall Street led to the easy-target skewering of “Darth” Dick Cheney in Vice, and now Don’t Look Up takes aim at the whole shebang, the State of Politics in America Today, and it’s more bloat than substance. McKay takes aim at Trump rallies, social media and reality-TV frippery, the slow creep of ethical compromise in news media, political nepotism, isolated billionaires, the growing global influence of Big Tech, science denialism, and there’s probably more, but making this list is wearing me out.

McKay insists that all of the above works in intricate lockstep and is leading us to obliteration, and, hey, tell us something we don’t know, man. You’ll trawl the film for a little hope, and find it in the kindness of others dwelling in the valley of the shadow of deathmongers, i.e., self-involved knowitall politicians and greedy CEOs. It certainly says something that Don’t Look Up inspires big-topic discussion in spite of its unholy DiCaprio-Lawrence-Streep-Blanchett-Chalamet conglomeration. McKay broadswords rah-rah swelling-pride patriotic astronaut movies, guts idealistic average-person-runs-for-President political fantasies and eviscerates cataclysmic disaster films as a means to stump hard and heavy for common sense. He insists that if we’re going to go down, it’s best to go down laughing. And in the glib tone wholly inspired by this movie, I can only say, sure, why not?

Our Call: There’s plenty of amusement to be gleaned from Don’t Look Up, in its mostly too-easy jokes and irresistible cast. But let it be known that it doesn’t justify its 138-minute run time, its commentary is obvious and it never quite fulfills the potential of its plethora of talent. So lower your expectations before you STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Don't Look Up on Netflix