Adam McKay's post-comedy career has been built on a specific and polarizing formal premise: that the most effective way to explain how contemporary institutions fail is to show those failures playing out in real time, with a satirical directness that refuses the ambiguity of more conventional drama. The Big Short made the 2008 financial crisis into something close to a thriller by finding characters whose specific expertise could illuminate the systemic failure without reducing it to abstraction. Vice applied the same approach to Dick Cheney's career with mixed results, the formal ambition occasionally running ahead of the dramatic construction. Don't Look Up is the most extreme expression of the method: a film that removes all plausibility deniability from its satire and stages the end of the world as a direct consequence of the same media, political, and corporate dynamics that govern the present.
Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) are astronomers who discover a comet on a direct collision course with Earth and spend the film's runtime trying to make anyone in a position of institutional authority care enough to act. President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) is interested only in the political calculus. The media is interested in whether the story will generate engagement. A technology billionaire (Mark Rylance) is interested in the mineral deposits the comet contains and the leverage its interception would provide over competing nations. The scientists are interested in survival. The scientists lose.
The film has been criticized for the obviousness of its targets and the bluntness of its satire, and neither criticism is entirely wrong. McKay is not interested in nuance about the mechanisms of institutional failure, and the film's portrait of political self-interest, media distraction, and corporate capture of crisis response is cartoonish by design. The question is whether the cartoonishness serves the argument or undermines it, and the answer is complicated by the degree to which the film's most exaggerated moments resemble things that have actually happened in the years surrounding its production. The satire's obviousness is the point, and the discomfort it generates in audiences who recognize themselves or their political allegiances in the film's targets is the discomfort the film is engineering.
The casting is doing meaningful work throughout. DiCaprio and Lawrence both perform against type with enough commitment that the characters feel observed rather than constructed. Streep's Orlean is a caricature, but the specific quality of the caricature is precise enough to function as something more: a portrait of a particular kind of political shamelessness that is not party-specific and that the film is careful to leave ideologically unanchored. Rylance's billionaire is the film's most quietly disturbing creation, a man whose certainty in his own algorithmic model of human behavior has displaced his ability to process information that does not confirm it.
The film is existentially bleak in a way that distinguishes it from McKay's previous work. The Big Short ended with anger. Don't Look Up ends with something closer to resignation, and the specific emotional register of that resignation, the feeling of watching institutions fail in real time and having no mechanism to stop them, was perhaps the film's most precisely calibrated effect for the audience watching it in late 2021. Whether the film's cynicism is a form of clarity or a form of surrender is a legitimate question the film raises and does not resolve, which may be the most honest thing about it.
Don't Look Up is on Netflix and is recommended specifically to viewers who found The Big Short and Vice rewarding. The formal approach is an acquired taste, and it is the most demanding application of that approach McKay has attempted.
