Netflix's Don't Look Up: Not Dr. Strangelove, But Has a Good Cast
Don’t Look Up. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Full disclosure: I watched Netflix’s Don’t Look Up fully expecting to hate it, because I think Adam McKay makes terrible, overrated movies that believe themselves to be masterpieces but are actually badly written, horrendously edited stink bombs that get praised by people who have no vision or taste. So, you can know that when I say this I mean it: Don’t Look Up was better than was I expecting. I wouldn’t call it good, but I would say it’s at least better than The Big Short. However, McKay still can’t help indulging in many of the worst impulses that made that movie such a logjammer and so, while Don’t Look Up is a marginal improvement, I would not recommend it.
Don’t Look Up is a film about an asteroid headed for Earth, but people ignore the warnings of scientists and waste their time on pointless social media drama until it’s too late and the asteroid destroys all life. A venal, image-obsessed president and an Elon Musk-type tech mogul help lead us into this disaster. It is a thinly veiled metaphor for climate change, and is meant to be a satire. The main criticisms of the film are that the satire is not very subtle. Satire is pretty boring when it’s in your face and in fact, there is a scene in Don’t Look Up where Ariana Grande for some reason has a concert and sings the line “Listen to the goddamn scientific experts” or something like that.
This was the same issue that hurt The Big Short. In almost every conceivable instance where the story could have shown us something, it instead just told us. Instead of showing us Christian Bale was an eccentric weirdo, it had a voice-over tell us that he was. Don’t Look Up is marginally better in this department, but only ever so marginally (see: Ariana Grande scene mentioned above). It is still pretty much bashing you over the head with its message, although this story benefits from being an original rather than drawing on actual events.
Stylistically, Don’t Look Up has the same awful aesthetic as The Big Short. A lot of shaky-cam handheld stuff, with the camera bobbing and weaving, a lot of smash cuts, a lot of pseudo-art house wannabe Terrence Malick cuts to images of nature. I don’t think this is intentionally bad editing either, like it’s part of the satire. I think that McKay strings these images of human catastrophe together with pristine images of nature and life in a genuine attempt to convey a high-minded environmental message. Again that is rather unsubtle and I found it pretty dumb, and the hyper-kinetic, frenzied editing style in general is not something I am a fan of.
The satire of an idiot president leading us to ruin also doesn’t work but here it’s not McKay’s fault. American politics has become so debased and so dumb that at this point it is beyond parody. The satire cannot reach the ludicrous levels of real American politics, which elected a buffoonish reality star to the highest office in the land. The joke that the president in Don’t Look Up has appointed her moronic son to be the Chief of Staff is kind of funny, but doesn’t really land because we have, in actual reality, just lived through four years of Jared Kushner. The satire is less shocking than the reality, and that’s our own fault.
I have seen people compare this to Dr. Strangelove, which could not be more wrong. Strangelove is one of the greatest films of all time, perhaps the greatest comedy of all time. There’s nothing in Don’t Look Up approaching the subtle brilliance of “Gentlemen you can’t fight in here, this is The War Room!” Instead, you get people screaming directly into the camera: “We are all going to die if you don’t listen to scientists!” It’s not that I disagree with this message, but again McKay likes to just shout these things in your face and call it satire. I think that’s pretty weak craftsmanship.
The cast is amazing though. I don’t know what happened here, maybe Leonardo DiCaprio got all his tree-hugger Hollywood friends to join at cut rates, because you have tremendous actors like Timothée Chalamet and Cate Blanchett in basically very, very minor parts. Even with all this star power stuffed into the film, I thought the pacing and the narrative was pretty well spread out. You can do that with great actors because you don’t need to give a lot of back-story or exposition; the performances fill in the blanks, and it’s fun to watch charismatic actors even in bit parts. So the sheer star power of the cast helped elevate the material, in my opinion.
And that is Don’t Look Up in a nutshell. It’s Satire For Dummies, bangs you over the head with its message in very unsubtle ways that are made palatable by a great cast. It was better than I was expecting, but still not very good and visually it’s potpourri. And the saddest thing about the film was really sort of accidental, which is that it is now impossible to spoof American politics because what we have already done to ourselves in real life is too embarrassing and stupid to be satirized any more. Dark times, indeed.
