As the final moments of Don’t Look Up approached, I was grieving. It took me by surprise, I must admit. Undoubtedly, Adam McKay’s latest film is a comedy, his most ridiculous since the long-gone days of Ron Burgundy. But it’s also a disaster film, opening on the discovery of a comet scheduled to collide with Earth and extinguish all life in six short months. What makes Don’t Look Up a comedy is the laughable ways in which this disaster is not overcome. With every inane and awkward punchline comes a new setback. Warnings are ignored or covered up, plans are waylaid or cynically redrawn, human frailties balloon into costly distractions and psychotic delusions. And then, all at once, the impossible becomes the inevitable.
In these last minutes, Don’t Look Up kicks away its hysterical scaffolds and reveals the tragedy McKay has been building beneath them all along. Our heroes, separated along their journey, have reunited for a familial last supper, a futile and resolute sacrament against impending doom. Outside, the world descends into chaos as the comet makes impact and, in a matter of seconds, wipes everything away. This balancing act—poignant, pathetic chatter, against the macro-dramatic rush of images from across the dying Earth—attests to McKay’s development as a technician of the earnest Hollywood blockbuster he’s long been content merely to ape. It’s broad, big-budget stuff, the kind of industrial light and magic the multiplex was made for. The elegiac bleakness of it all, even if you know it’s coming, is still something of a gut check.
Judged on this moment alone, Don’t Look Up is a successful entertainment. But McKay is interested in more. While those early collaborations with Will Ferrell often took place in a satirically inflated culture war atmosphere, the director’s trajectory since the end of their partnership has bent overtly towards progressive populism. The Big Short and especially Vice used self-consciously excessive, vulgar, and gleefully stupid Hollywood pyrotechnics to leverage sober, left-wing critiques of financial and political power. Here, McKay takes a leap forward in seriousness and scale. If you missed its lavish rollout campaign, Don’t Look Up isn’t particularly subtle about the parallel asserted between the film’s fictional comet and the real threat climate change poses to our world. Flattening the greatest crisis our world now faces into its simplest and most entertaining cinematic terms, McKay aims to evangelize even (and especially) the most apolitical moviegoer, where patronizing infographics and liberal condescension have failed. May a hundred dirtbag flowers bloom.
That’s the theory, at least. If nothing else, Don’t Look Up stands to draw audiences on par with McKay’s Anchorman days (on Netflix, if not in theaters) with levels of star power that would make the Avengers blush. Our heroes, humble public university research scientists Kate Dibiasky and her professor Randall Mindy, are played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio. To save the world from their discovery, they must compel decisive action from President Orlean, a composite of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin played by Meryl Streep, and her son, a Kushnerian manchild chief of staff played by Jonah Hill. McKay’s cartoonish screenplay is putty in these (and other) actors’ capable hands; there’s a vicarious satisfaction watching performers with such dramatic reach lending depth and flesh to characters that are essentially stock. If the film lives anywhere, it’s in their scenes together, where the dance of outrage and indifference yields an eminently watchable grotesque.
It makes me wish McKay had reached for more from his script. In Don't Look Up, the idiosyncrasies of his early comedies have disappeared. Even if the sketch rhythms honed from his days at SNL remain, the jokes themselves feel like placeholders. Real laughs are vastly outnumbered by moments where a knowing smile might be more appropriate—a litmus test for the difference between comedy per se, and flattery of a particular set of left-media types McKay in actuality seems insistent on courting.
The plot, too, is formulaic and wobbly. An embarrassing meeting between the scientists and the President at the White House gives rise to a fizzled attempt at a press leak; the comet is targeted for destruction, but the operation is mysteriously called off—the culprit, a soft-spoken telecom executive who wants to use his own, unproven technology to strip the comet for valuable mineral resources. Don’t Look Up’s satirical targets are soft—politics, the media, big business, in that order—and resemble their real-life analogues too closely to allow any room for invention. Its haphazard progress has the feeling of a first draft batted around a writers’ room—or, more dubiously, a Twitter thread. While McKay’s films once possessed the sophomoric power to shape the zeitgeist in advance, his screenplay here too often seems to scrape its ideas directly from social media: viral outbursts on cable news, moronic slogans taking flight at political rallies, the whiplash micro-cycle of a nobody from nowhere transforming (briefly) into the galaxy’s brightest star. All ripe points of departure, but if wallowing in the banality of the familiar wasn’t expressly the point, McKay is still too caught up in his long, predictable lampoon to develop any surprises. Perhaps he thinks cynicism is actually what’s missing from portrayals of our image-regime in this new decade. Meanwhile, the commitment to allegory and didacticism comes to seem like an alibi against originality.
And what are we really allegorizing, anyway? Without question, climate change is the existential threat of our lifetimes. According to the IPCC, to prevent its worst effects, the world must stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere entirely by 2050—a technological emergency that will only compound as environmental conditions continue to deteriorate. But the disaster that science has forecast, and the dithering our establishment has managed in response, is where the similarities between the comet and climate change end. A radically external event like a comet’s arrival from outer space—the quintessential force majeure—bypasses altogether the complex interconnections that a warming planet shares with nearly every facet of waking life in the developed world. It’s this reality that makes climate change a unique topic of denial and obfuscation—it’s also what makes it the rich narrative opportunity that McKay hasn’t so much squandered as missed altogether.
If the comet metaphor doesn’t serve the climate question’s finer points, a better one might be an insatiable worldwide addiction. Social media, coincidentally, is another antagonist in Don’t Look Up, a force that paralyzes civic reason and amplifies consumer drives, training the world's attention, if only on the objects idiotic and vain enough to be worthy of it. The announcement of the comet, we are told, is outpaced in all the relevant media metrics by the recent breakup of airheaded teenybopper star Riley Bina, played oh-so-winkingly by Ariana Grande. A fixation on the entertainment-industrial complex becomes clearer when we consider that McKay shares a story credit on Don’t Look Up with inveterate Twitter combatant and fiery Bernie Sanders campaign adviser David Sirota. After five years of abuse from the media’s most influential and moronic corners, Sirota has more than earned a caricature like “The Daily Rip,” a spicy-but-insubstantial morning news show that finds co-anchors played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett laughing down imminent destruction with cretinous banter. But this scathing portrait of the media landscape largely spares any targets nearer to its production's camp. An account of the shortfalls of more sophisticated, well-intentioned media byproducts (like the McKay-produced Succession, beloved by a professional viewership now largely in retreat from activism) would, it seems, distract needlessly from the unadulterated force of well-loved Oscar-winners screaming repeatedly into McKay’s cameras that we’re all going to die.
It would be facile to criticize a film explicitly designed around a big, dumb explosion so meticulously, if it didn’t set so much store in its own efficacy as climate propaganda. If Don’t Look Up falters there—so the theory seems to go—the rest of its inane pageantry is all for naught. And yet, for a cinematic call to action, our heroes never put up much of a fight. The scientist’s last-ditch attempt to overturn the regime’s dubious extraction plan is a phone-banking campaign, topped by a dazzling but dull Live Aid-style concert headlined by Bina and her DJ fiancée played by Kid Cudi. A simple, centralized problem demands a simple, centralized solution: the comet can only be destroyed by nuclear weapons, which means it can only be destroyed by the government. In that tight timeframe, many of the extra-governmental, not-strictly-peaceful alternatives suggested by Andreas Malm’s recent book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, are simply impractical; nor does the film entertain, even in passing what we might call the “First Reformed Option.” Between meek resistance and an insurmountable enemy, the film seems almost contemptuous—not just of its heroes, but of the entire planet. As the end approaches, Don’t Look Up can feel like the indulgence of two embittered leftists, a punishment fantasy lobbed at a society that—having foolishly rejected their candidate, and their ideology—was, in a sense, already condemned.
The stranglehold of Peter Isherwell, the aloof tech guru played by Mark Rylance, tightens around the film’s third act. CEO of the AI-driven mobile network Bash, Isherwell resembles no one so much as Marshall Applewhite, leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult, who in 1997 led his followers to mass suicide in order to escape the Earth's impending destruction on a spaceship they believed was hidden by the passage of the comet Hale-Bopp. Isherwell’s sermon on the algorithmic determinism of human life and death telegraphs the film’s views on our insurgent technotopia. But if the signature of capitalist realism, as Mark Fisher described it, is the belief that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, then McKay and Isherwell might find themselves on the same spectrum. Alternatives to capitalism at its most violent and nihilistic are, in McKay’s vision, foreclosed on all sides, whether by clunky narrative strictures, or by a simple failure of imagination. It’s a disappointment from the director of Vice—a film which, for all its flaws, was almost psychedelic in its ambitions to pinpoint our paranoid and despondent present's multifarious roots. The destruction that climate change exacts on humanity will not be instantaneous or universal; its consequences will arrive inequitably, on a long and unstructured timetable that has already begun. The transformations it imposes on us will demand real imagination in turn, beyond the narrow hierarchies and disempowering structures that McKay so blandly and complacently reproduces. A crisis that more closely reflects climate change’s combined and uneven development might have prompted a more diverse set of responses from within the world of Don’t Look Up. It might also, frankly, have made for a less thoroughly blackpilled film.
For McKay and Sirota, it’s possible that the alternative they imagined is already dead. For many, even millions, the last best hope to revive American democracy as an instrument of justice and reason—the one true instrument capable of tackling the challenges presented by climate change—was a Sanders presidency. Don’t Look Up styles itself as a warning, but it might be more accurate to think of it as an act of grief. Its utility as recruitment material for the climate movement can never really be known. Most likely, it will color the consumption habits of those who already agree with its ideological premise—those who have been slowly brought to the cause by a media which (far from denialistic, as the film might imply, but perhaps more insidiously) has merely incorporated climate messaging at a rate that its political and industrial patrons will bear. As for McKay and Sirota's left-media allies, their reflexive praise of the film belies the insecurity of a movement still desperately lacking a real aesthetic program to match its political one.
Increasingly, it will not be disaster movies, but disasters themselves that bring people out into the streets, and to the construction sites where pipelines are laid and refineries built, to build something new instead. Maybe it’s wisdom that McKay doesn’t try to guess what that will look like, but he knows enough to know that it will shape the terms of society’s next confrontation. Confrontation, as any student of the past six years can see, means audience. Grand societal statements in film are a Hollywood cliché, but whatever their cause, in the final analysis, these films propagandize most effectively on behalf of Hollywood itself, its moral and aesthetic authority, and its own unchecked flows of content and capital. Whether any such product can ever actually instigate change is a matter for Don’t Look Up’s defenders to debate. For the rest of us, now is not the time for tears.