Don't Look Up

Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence in “Don't Look Up.” Netflix image via IMDB

Why do the birds go on singing?
Why do the stars glow above?
Don't they know it's the end of the world?

– Skeeter Davis, The End of the World

At a lab not unlike Pukalani's Institute for Astronomy, Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is tracking points of light across a bank of computer screens when she happens onto an anomaly. Dismayed by her discovery, she runs it by her boss, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). He's dismayed, too.

There's a comet the size of Mount Everest on a collision course with the Earth. It will arrive in six months 14 days. It will cause what astronomers call a planet extinction event.

The end of the world is the subject of director/co-writer Adam McKay's new comedy, “Don't Look Up.” 

Yes, you read that right. Comedy. After launching his career with “Saturday Night Live,” then moving to the big screen to direct many of Will Farrell's greatest hits, McKay has broadened his scope in recent years to brainier subjects like “The Big Short.” 

“Don't Look Up” is his brainiest yet. It's absolutely brilliant … but also cynical, depressing and more and more terrifying as it goes along.

Kate and Dr. Mindy do the right thing with their finding. First they bring it to the attention of NASA and the government, all the way up to the president (Meryl Streep). When she's not sufficiently alarmed, they go to the media – including the MSNBC-like “Daily Rip,” hilariously hosted by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry.

Rob Morgan is Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, the only ally the intrepid astronomers can find in the government. At the other end of the moral spectrum, Mark Rylance is an obscenely wealthy tech mogul whose distracted, idiot savant demeanor masks his icy soul as he creates the algorithms that make us all tick. Then there's Jonah Hill, as President Streep's patronizing, clueless chief of staff, who also happens to be her son. 

Ariana Grande and Timothée Chalamat are among the stars along for the ride.

Despite the astronomers' dire warnings, the media's not all that interested. Celebrity breakups and topless hospital nurses make for way better ratings.

And as for social media … don't even go there. 

While Dr. Mindy quickly emerges on magazine covers as “the sexy scientist,” Kate Dibiasky just as quickly memes into a shrill Chicken Little alarmist. And as some citizens heed their message, there soon are powerful forces at work denying their warnings of impending doom, or that the comet even exists. 

Once the comet actually becomes visible without a telescope, the deniers rally around the message from right-wing media and huge concert rallies: “Don't look up!”

The performances are, for the most part, great … which makes them that much more upsetting. Streep, who derisively impersonated Donald Trump one Halloween, channels the former president's transactional, self-absorbed psychopathy, only with blond hair instead of orange. Hill as First Son – another not so subtle reminder of the Trump White House – embodies the mean spiritedness occupying the People's House in those years, and lurking throughout the film.

All those A-listers may have signed onto this project to show they are pro-science, regardless of what their characters might do in the story. It's scary to think they find such litmus tests necessary.

McKay is an acute observer of the most minute details of our values-bereft, media-obsessed times, and is pitch perfect translating these flaws into satire. That's the strength of “Don't Look Up.” It's also its curse. While its production values are huge, from satellite launch sites and control rooms, to gigantic crowd scenes as the hysteria mounts, more winds up being less, blurring the film's focus.

Like a blend of topical classics “Dr. Strangelove” and “Network,” it is a work of furious rage … trying to mask underlying feelings of impotence. For the (literal) crash course it offers in astronomy, it shows the real dangers we face are right here on earth, in the place where our brains used to be. Our extinction won't come from a wayward meteor, but from our own ignorance and arrogance.

Among its other excesses, the movie is bloated with Nature Channel-style images of wildlife that will be toast, along with everything else on earth, if we don't start looking up. Real fast. 

It's hard to pinpoint where “Don't Look Up” stops feeling like a comedy and starts feeling like a documentary – but we've stopped laughing long before that happens.