Don't Look Up

 Don't Look Up  (2021)is a brute-force satire produced by Netflix.  It's a prestige movie, populated with the likes of Leonardo di Caprio, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, and Jennifer Hudson.  Even the great Mark Rylance performs, impersonating a man-child Silicon Valley technocrat who is touted as the world's third wealthiest man and, apparently, modeled on the loathsome Elon Musk. The movie is long and elaborate, almost two and half hours, and it contains a variety of things, all of it intended as a savage Swiftian satire on Donald Trump and his followers.  The problem with this kind of film is that it is preaching to the choir,  Hollywood liberals satirizing conservatives for the benefit of other liberals -- and, of course, Donald Trump and his allies are, more or less, beyond satire:  their antics are already ironic in a sour post-modern way and much of what these folks say and do is already a kind of joke.  You can't satirize the "cry lib" provocations of Trump and his acolytes -- this conduct is already exaggerated and stylized beyond any rational politics or social commentary.  Ultimately, this very hard-working movie becomes less a commentary on our divided politics than yet another symptom diagnostic of the acidulous state of division prevailing in this country.

The film involves a young woman, a doctoral candidate named Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Hudson) who discovers one night a new comet.  The comet, which is named after her is on a collision course with Earth and, due to the asteroid's size, impact with be an "extinction event."  Kate confirms these dire mathematics with her mentor, Dr. Mindy, a astronomer from the University of Michigan.  (It's a joke in the movie that no one pays any attention to anything said by a graduate or instructor from Michigan until the same facts are confirmed and re-stated by a Harvard or Yale or Princeton grad.)  Kate and Dr. Mindy are whisked to the White House where the President, distracted by the implosion of her Supreme Court candidate's nomination by a sex-scandal is managing that crisis and quite willing to ignore the fact that the world is about to be snuffed out by a "meteor the size of Mount Everest."  Miffed at being ignored at the White House, Dr. Mindy and Kate get themselves booked on a morning talk show called "The Daily Rip", a sort of sex and gossip emporium that bears some resemblance, I suppose, to Fox and Friends or other TV programs of that ilk.  On the show, Kate gets hysterical and is disrespected by the hosts, particularly Brie, the attractive and fantastically self-absorbed female talk show presenter.  Dr. Mindy, because he is Leonardo di Caprio, is viewed as wonderfully telegenic and Brie and her Black co-host, a burly and humorous guy, like him; he's a ratings plus and, ultimately, Brie even has an affair with the astronomer.  (The casting requires us to regard di Caprio as spectacularly handsome and appealing to women, although, in fact, he's rather feckless and a hypochondriac -- put bluntly, di Caprio is no longer the handsome kid who starred in the Titanic a quarter century ago and it takes some suspension of disbelief to view him as the script wants us to.)  At first, the White House dismisses as hysteria the claim that the comet is going to smash into Chile and destroy the world.  In fact, the NASA chief, a woman who is major campaign donor to President Orlean and a former anesthesiologist denounces Dr Mindy and Kate's warnings as "fake new" and bad science.  However, when some Harvard and Yale astronomers confirm that the asteroid is, indeed, a planet killer, the White House takes note and, in fact, appoints Dr. Mindy to the commission tasked with saving the world.  Kate is regarded as too emotional and unreliable for a role in the government's mission and she is arrested by the FBI (for  second time) and simply "taken off the grid" -- she has to sign a non-disclosure agreement and ends up back in Michigan.  Meanwhile, the President (Meryl Streep) has organized a huge launch of space ships to take down the asteroid.  This mission is led by a crazy military hero, Benedict Drask played by Ron Perlman.  The mission is aborted suddenly.  The space ships turn back and parachute into the sea off Cape Canaveral.  The reason for the mission's retreat is that the autistic man-child and Silicon Valley mogul has discovered that the asteroid is made of rare-earths that he needs for his cell-phone empire.  This man, Peter Isherwell, takes over the mission and devises a flotilla of space craft that look like Transformers designed to land on the asteroid, blow it apart and, then, steer the fragments into the Pacific Ocean where they can be mined for their rare minerals.  Meanwhile, Kate is hanging out with some nihilistic skate boarders led by Timothee Chalamet; he  becomes her lover.  Dr. Mindy is engaged in a love affair with the beautiful and shallow Brie, the talk show host of "The Daily Rip".  Mindy's wife confronts him and throws his various pill boxes at him -- he's taking about a dozen different meds for his various psychosomatic ailments.  Isherwell's scheme, which is insane, fails.  The asteroid slams into Earth and everyone dies except for a tiny cadre of survivors who are blasted into outer space on one of Isherwell's space craft.  23,000 years later the space ship lands on another earth but it's inhabited by carnivorous monsters who eat all of the naked astronauts as they emerge from their cryogenically induced sleep.  In the final scene, we see Jonah Hill, the President's son and chief factotum, emerge from the smoking rubble on Earth.  He takes a couple selfies and, then, invites people to subscribe to his podcast hashtag @lastmanonearth.  But he is the last man, indeed, and subscribers are few and far between.

The film's general structure is cribbed from Dr. Strangelove.  There are the same motifs of wild-eyed lunatic generals, a military hero like Captain King Kong in Kubrick's film, here Benedict Drask who we last see blasting away at the asteroid with his machine gun as it falls to earth.  (We have earlier seen Drask at the head of the armada of space ships on the aborted mission -- he's singing some of kind of hillbilly patriotic song.)  The role of the sinister if avuncular Strangelove is played by Mark Rylance as the weirdly disengaged and soft-spoken Isherwell.  And there is the same motif of the privileged few escaping the holocaust.  It's apparent that the meteor speeding toward Earth is a surrogate for both global warming and COVID.  Right-wing news media claim the comet is a Liberal hoax or, even, some kind of Jewish space satellite.  Everything becomes politicized to the extent that many conservatives refuse to look up where the evidence of impending doom is emblazoned across the sky.  Meanwhile, the Left promotes benefit concerts, including a  huge show by Ariana Grande, called "Just Look Up" -- the show features Grande's pop tune to that effect.  Finally, at one of the Right Wing rallies someone does look up to see the night sky livid with the enormous fiery comet.  The people at the rally are horrified that they have been lied-to and begin throwing bottles at Jonah Hill, President Orlean's son and political advisor; hit by a bottle, he flees the podium muttering "the fuckin' hillbillies' hit my face and cut my eye."  (This is a deviation from reality -- the true believers on the Trump side are quite willing to be martyred before they will acknowledge that COVID, for instance, is real and a threat -- they go to their graves proudly proclaiming that the very disease that is killing them isn't real at all.)   Like most satire, the film doesn't have the courage of its convictions, and turns maudlin in the last twenty minutes as the world ends, not a flaw in the Kubrick film on which this picture is rather transparently based.  Dr. Mindy abandons the shallow and vicious Brie and returns to his family in Lansing, Michigan.  Kate is there with her skate-boarder boyfriend and the obligatory Black scientist hero.  Everyone makes small talk as the world ends.  There's an alarming shot near the end:  the comet has ripped into earth and killed everyone but we see an intact block of apartment buildings, delicately coated with snow.  It looks like part of the Earth has somehow been spared -- but, then, we see that the buildings are standing on an amputated chunk of the earth that is whirling through space with Louis Vuitton bags, half-incinerated cows, and the mutilated torso of a blue whale.  Just before the comet strikes, Dr. Mindy pronounces the film's effective, if simple-minded, theme:  "We really did have everything when you think about it" -- these words pronounced as tsunamis of fire whirl through the atmosphere.

The film is too angry to be funny and it's oddly (and disconcertingly) accurate about science denial on the Right.  The movie is also quite disturbing -- it's painful to see the world end and the final sequences are spectacular and horrific, footage that belongs in an entirely different kind of movie. (The ending of Dr. Strangelove with its black and white government films of nuclear blasts scored to "We'll Meet Again" is exemplary for how this sort of material can be tactfully handled in a way that is disturbing, but bearable.)  In fact, some aspects of the movie's last half-hour are a bit like Lars von Trier's depressing masterpiece Melancholia in which the moon smashes into the Earth with predictably dire consequences. 

Every card-carrying Liberal in Hollywood, apparently, wanted to be part of his movie.  Cate Blanchett plays Brie and the movie is packed with big-name bankable stars of all kinds.  (It's a little bit like Its a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World cast with a Who's who of mid-sixties comedians.)  The film directed by Adam McKay feels like "virtue signaling" in some respects although, in fact, the pathology that the picture depicts is depressingly accurate and true to life.  The fact that everything is now politicized is shown in awful and persuasive detail in the film.  But everything is colossal, too big for comfort, and film is too awful in some respects to be amusing.  It's an okay picture but strangely forgettable given its grandiose themes.  The best thing in the movie is a final scene the Brie and her  jovial Black co-host.  He says:  "What should we do? Fuck? Pray?" Brie says:  "No, no let's just get drunk and talk shit about people."  This dialogue occurs as the sky is literally falling.