If there’s anything that mid-career Adam McKay wants you to know, it’s that he and his films are relevant. Sparked by the surprise praise for the fantastic Talladega Nights as a great satire, his descent into Hollywood agitprop began in earnest with The Other Guys, where the normally-tempering presence of Will Ferrell to McKay’s audience-instructive ambitions gave way to a lengthy end-credits montage that trotted out statistics about just how much we were (and still are) being screwed by the rich, but it took a few years for it to mature into a feature. I still like The Big Short — it’s well-written, appropriately flippant in tone, and features an incredible cast — but it’s understandable how people felt patronized by McKay’s particular approach to a complicated arena like finance and bad behavior in the recession-era. Where my opinion dovetails back towards some sort of consensus is Vice, which was just awful, being the kind of smug bullshit that the director had successfully managed to avoid in practically every other film in his career, smothering the audience with a fuck-you knowingness that they, the sheeple, were responsible for Dick Cheney’s advance through the political realm. His latest film, the apocalyptic Netflix satire Don’t Look Up, should perhaps sport the moniker that was featured so many times in studio comedy trailers over the last twenty years — “From The Guy Who Brought You Vice” — because it’s more of the same, only this time it’s somehow even worse. Insert your own “rooting for the asteroid” joke here, because I’m pretty sure you’re clever enough to come up with something funnier and more provocative than McKay can.
That’s not to say it’s empty, as Don’t Look Up does its best to justify its 130-odd minute running time by cramming as many plot points and famous faces as it possibly can to try and prevent you from navigating away to A Christmas Prince 3 or whatever after the first few jokes fall flat. Here, I’ll see how many names I can cram into a synopsis without having to spoil anything. Two Michigan State scientists — Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), a family man who lives a quiet life with his wife (Melanie Lynskey) and his two sons, and his punk (in the corporate sense) student, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discover that a comet (which will here be referred to as an asteroid because God help me I am not an astrologer) is on a collision course with Earth. They call Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), who runs the US’s space-monitoring government agency, and realize that they’ve got an extinction-level event on their hands. Oglethorpe gets the pair a meeting with the President, a brash and low-minded woman named Orlean (Meryl Streep), who hoovers cigarettes because it makes her poll numbers go up and has hired her dumbass kid (Jonah Hill) as her chief of staff. They’re basically laughed out of the room by the political class, who tell them that the number of end-of-the-world meetings they have on a weekly basis would make their heads spin. So, the two take their story to the media, and wind up going on a talk show as the follow-up act to a pop star (Ariana Grande) who is feuding with her boyfriend (Kid Cudi), whose hosts are played by Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett, and Dibiasky absolutely freaks out. She becomes a meme, no one cares, and the asteroid’s still headed to Earth.
Well, a few weeks later, the three scientists get black-bagged by the FBI and are brought to the White House, where they’re informed that, yes, their Harvard-educated scientists have discovered that the asteroid is, in fact, real and that they’re going to do something about it. Thinking of the press it will generate in the lead-up to the midterms, Orlean taps a retired general (Ron Perlman) to lead a suicide mission to blow the asteroid up with a bunch of nukes in tow, but, at the very last second, the shuttle he’s piloting returns to Earth. Why? Well, because a tech guru named Peter Isherwood (Mark Rylance, doing the same schtick he did in Ready Player One) has done his own analysis and discovered that the asteroid is actually full of gold and diamonds and rare Earth metals. Just think of the profit margins, he intones while mapping out his own plan to blow up the asteroid but in a safe way, while also nudging Orlean to remind her that he donated a shitload of money to her campaign. So, Mindy gets tasked with helping the government respond, essentially being a shill for the powers-that-be to give their plan a reputable face in the public eye (and while also bagging Blanchett’s talk-show host character), while Dibiasky fucks off back home to stock shelves and snuggle up with a dipshit skater boy (Timothee Chalamet), as her boyfriend (Himesh Patel) left her once she went viral (there’s a fun read of this movie that suggests it’s about the Ferrell/McKay divorce, but I won’t elaborate much further on that). The asteroid, however, doesn’t really care about any of this, and who knows if any of these people will come to their senses in time to save the Earth, or to save this screenplay from itself. But! That’s a whole lot of famous people, huh?
What makes Don’t Look Up so particularly poor, besides just how much talent it squanders in the process, is that it fails miserably at being a satire. This is both to say that it’s not particularly funny (though Perlman does his best to bring some life to the whole thing as the drunken old-timer general-turned-astronaut, a pale reflection of a Ron Burgundy bit that still manages to land in the midst of all this mess) and that the Big Statement that McKay is intending to depart on his audience is rendered almost incomprehensible by the choice of metaphor. One could watch the entirety of Don’t Look Up and miss that it’s supposed to be about global warming, and unless they haven’t encountered dozens of articles online where the filmmaker pleads to the interviewer (or audience) to listen, I think it’s a certainty. This isn’t a failure on the part of the audience, who will see Meryl Streep doing a Trump riff and pick up what he’s putting down, but rather from the central cortex of the film’s brain trust itself As a dramatic-minded agitprop filmmaker, a creator-of-meaning or teacher or whatever, McKay found a comfortable niche doing two specific things: condensing vast amounts of information into easy-to-digest narratives, which can then be baby-birded into the wailing mouths of audiences, and translating real-life events into compelling scenes that fit comfortably in those complicated narratives. Stripped away from the structure of a life or a financial crisis, he flounders and attempts to take on everything — media, celebrity, politics, business — at once in the mildest possible fashion while using the plots of Deep Impact and Armageddon as substitutes without, you know, that whole “entertainment” thing that prevented those movies from offering clear and concise moral instruction.
Perhaps it’s that the asteroid metaphor is a total non-starter when put up to this storytelling challenge. If there’s anything certain about global warming and the subsequent effects of climate change, it’s that they’re incredibly slow-moving and inherently shrouded by our perceptions of time and weather. We know future climates will be bad, but we do not know to what degree they will be, as some reasonable scenarios suggest that, with action now, we may be able to prevent some of the worst outcomes, while others seem to say that we’re pretty much fucked no matter what we do. Asteroids predicted that far out (say, six months or so), offer two certainties that they don’t share with climate woes: unless we do something, we will die horribly in an instant, and a specific end date and time of impact which one can point to when they’re shouting THE END IS NIGH on the street and begging folks to pay attention to them. It’s that gradual decline, the slow descent into oblivion, that prevents us from fully being able to see what we’re losing as we lose it, all of which we won’t know until we wake up one morning, decades and decades from now, and remember when springs were mild and there was such a thing as snow. But it’s also interesting that McKay refuses to acknowledge that there might be any such thing as corruption or impurity on the lower levels of the discipline that we call “the sciences,” where oil company money has been pumped into institutions, for decades now, to shift the blame that lay with polluters on to other negligible factors or on to the individual. This is one of the things that makes climate legislation so hard to pass, a fog of knowledge war covering the battlefield like mustard gas over No Man’s Land, choking the life out of any bill who dares breathe it in. And even then it’s not the taint of celebrity or the political influence one can possess that is the draw for this Faustian bargain: it’s often something as minor as tenure or in-field advancement.
If he focused on that — say, a science version of the Key and Peele sketch where actors playing MLK and Malcolm X at a regional theater start to ham it up for audience approval in a game of history-shredding one-upmanship — perhaps his point might be stronger and clearer, but he wouldn’t have the chance to stage a massive Ariana Grande number at “The Last Concert Ever” or whatever. In a way, what Don’t Look Up is missing is any sort of perspective beyond what a writer’s room at MSNBC might shit out after having digested a boatload of memes, old SNL sketches, and disaster films without having any Pepto to ease it out. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least storytelling, itself. There comes a point in a lot of artists lives where they’re effectively too-far-removed from the ground to see something for how it’s perceived by those around them, and the best seize on their own experiences of an event or a specific emotional state and channel that through, maintaining some sort of eternal relevancy in the process if sacrificing some sort of immediacy in order to do so. McKay is shaping up to be the other kind, a filmmaker who wants to be in touch with the moment while being firmly estranged from it by the same factors that inevitably sink a lot of artists mired in similar moments: status, wealth, and, of course, time. That’s a hard, hard place for a satirist to be at when they’re not provided with anchors, and, much like a boat that a dad forgot to tie down to a dock while running into the Bait Shop for some worms, Don’t Look Up weightlessly drifts away until it’s unreachable, a horizon-line glimmer just waiting to be crashed into by a drunken college student on a jet-ski.