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  • Writer's pictureEm Finan

Don't Look Up: Watchable Way to Kill An Evening




Don’t Look Up is the new It Girl of Netflix (or was, for a brief few days.)


After seeing countless memes and people moaning on Twitter and Instagram/basically being bombarded by the hype train of the internet these days, my housemate and I decided to give it a go.


Now, in the opinionated world of the internet, people had seemed to form camps. There were the ‘Omg, this movie is weird and I don't get it’ people, the ‘Wow Don’t Look Up is so deep 😍’ people, and then the ‘God, that movie is awful’ people.


I was fully prepared to slot myself into the latter group, being the cynic that I am. But I was pleasantly surprised by Adam McKay’s latest cinema venture.


Please don’t get me wrong.

It is far from being a masterpiece. It is hilarious, but in the way that I was laughing at the sheer absurdity and, for lack of a better word, cringe, that radiated out of it. It is satire, but it is not clever satire. At no point was I like, ‘Haha yeah, I get it, nice.’

They make sure any ‘hidden’ meaning (and spoilers, but the secret meaning is CLIMATE CHANGE) is made absolutely crystal clear.


Within the denseness of its own self-proclaimed social awareness, there are a few little gems buried deep.

I did enjoy the thinly veiled character of Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), a wet drip amalgamation of Bezos, Musk, and Jobs. His scenes are entertaining, if not generators of intense second-hand embarrassment, and Rylance has enough talent to play him off as a completely detached multimillionaire idiot, rather than trying to make him overly evil or intelligent for that matter.


Some other characters, like Jonah Hill’s self-absorbed, Zoomer-cringe Chief of White House Staff, are so laughable and hammy in their delivery at times I couldn’t tell if the movie was being ironic or genuinely thought it was being ‘woke’.

Hill described playing the role as ‘What if Fyre Festival was a person and that person had power in the White House’, which is an accurate summary of his character; shallow, annoying, and the encapsulation of the social media obsessed millennial/gen Z that middle society seems to despise. He, along with an (expected) excellent performance from Meryl Streep as the vain President, borders on buffoonery so absurd and STUPID you can’t do anything but laugh. I definitely laughed WITH Hill's character. I laughed AT pretty much everyone else.


But it’s a red flag when the ‘villains’, the self-absorbed ruling class, are far more likeable than the main cast. Jennifer Lawrence plays Kate Diabiasky, who has no real personality beyond ‘edgy’. Between her flawlessly rapping a Wu-Tang Clan song, weed-smoking, and general SJW pessimism, she might as well have had ‘I AM NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS’ written on her forehead with a big black pen.


Leonardo DiCaprio is refreshing as her bumbling, panic-prone PhD supervisor but he also lacks any real depth. I did enjoy his character arc where he embarks on a raunchy extra-marital affair with Cate Blanchett (who can blame him) and is drawn into the fame and fortune that tempts him astray after trying to warn the public of the oncoming asteroid. But beyond that, I just felt nothing for either of them. I really did not care about them, or about whether the world did listen to their pleas. I did not care about their journey to accepting the pointlessness of their campaign. I did care about what Streep and Hill were up to next.


I know the preachy tone of the film would have been even more insufferable had the two leads been golden-hearted martyrs, but Kate’s incessant snarkiness and coolness become irritating very quickly. This, combined with the extreme on-the-nose nature of the satire of Don’t Look Up, makes for exasperating watching. It seems to bask in its own ‘intelligence’, thus making it look even stupider.


One scene sees Kate having a hysterical breakdown on a news show, as the hosts continue to be flippant and make light of the fact that the apocalypse is coming. It’s supposed to be a moment for the audience to go ‘Alas, how blind the world of celebrity is!’, but it just ends up as being embarrassing to watch. My housemate and I literally shouted, ‘Shut UP’ multiple times when she was speaking. There is not an inch of tact in this film. It approaches absolutely everything with a mallet. It is very much a ‘We Live In A Society’ movie, which is a cinematic trend that makes me want to pull my fingernails out, unfortunately.


Maybe I’m now falling into the crowd that that movie strives to hate.


There’s just a smugness there, a ‘we’re better than you’ edge that kindles a real dislike deep within me. I wanted to side with the baddies just because they were far more entertaining and less exhausting. There was no gritty self-righteousness with them, just unabashed self-absorption, which I sort of respected more. I despise smugness in general, least of all in the form of a heavy-handed satire. It is not as clever as it thinks it is. Someone needs to tell Adam Mckay that.


Wait. I keep slating this film. Let me circle back.


The truth is, I really don’t feel anything particularly strong either way.


I didn’t hate it at all. I enjoyed parts. I was massively embarrassed in other parts. It’s shot well, it’s pleasing on the eye. The performances are strong - strong enough at times that Lawrence made me physically recoil. The editing is nice. Everything is just fine. Some brief moments are genuinely quite funny. It’s got my lovely Timmy Chalamet in it. It’s just not the massive masterpiece that it thinks it is.

Nor is it the worst thing in the world.


It’s just a weird, weird little movie. The pacing and tone are all over the place. It’s brutally flippant and then in the last half hour, really tries to make you feel something. Naturally, that doesn’t work.

You cannot force people to be emotionally invested in something that has spent nearly two hours gloating about how woke and self-aware it is.


Granted, I did feel moved by the end of the film, but that was probably because the credits song is by Bon Iver and all of their music makes me want to cry my eyes out.

And I’ll admit that DiCaprio’s final line, allegedly impoverished, is pretty crushing. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but think about how the film KNOWS it is crushing, and thus I refused to give it the satisfaction of making a genuine impact on me.


It took me about a fortnight to write this review because I realised I do not have many interesting things to say about this film. It tries so hard to say a lot, and at the end of it all, it’s just a pleasant-looking bit of dark comedy that takes itself way too seriously. It is SHALLOW. For a film that tries to mock Hollywood superficiality, it ends up being mostly devoid of any meaningful substance.


Don’t Look Up is watchable. It is entertaining enough to keep you interested for its stretched 2 hours and 30 minutes run time. If you can push past the colossal cringe and view it without the sincerity that it cries out for, it is ultimately an undemanding and watchable bit of nothing to kill an evening with.


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