'Don't Look Up' A Review

Don't Look Up is an end-of-the-world "satire" about two scientists who discover a meteor headed for earth, their difficulty getting anyone in the government to believe them or take it seriously, the media tour they embark on in order to sway public opinion, as well as the various responses the world has to trying to prevent the impending impact.

Leads Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are underutilized, their characters underwritten, and from a casting stand point they're not particularly appropriate for this kind of tone. The cast is absolutely stacked with talent, good on writer/director Adam McKay for all the gets, but for the most part they are not comedians and the odd tone is continually missed(other than Timothée Chalamet who seems to be the only person to understand what kind of movie he's in) making for something that is not very fun, pleasant, and from a satirical perspective, effective.

McKay is a great director and the production is well put together but never goes quite beyond competent in its aesthetics. There are simply some fundamental issues with the story- obvious, bludgeoning, inappropriate metaphors- with characterization which are not far enough removed from reality to be considered satire and so many characters and virtually no character development rendering this story about humanity relatively devoid of it. The approach also just feels old, dated, and careless. Who is this movie for? Other than 'climate change is real', what is this movie trying to say? If that is the sole message Al Gore did it better, more concisely, more informatively, less contentiously in 2006 with An Inconvenient Truth and then did it even better in 2017. So, what's the point?

Boring, pedantic, pseudo-liberal grandstanding. Waste of talent on all fronts.

Currently streaming on Netflix.

Don't See It.