Written and Directed by Adam McKay
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Mark Rylance
Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content
Runtime: 2 hours and 18 smug minutes
In theaters December 10, streaming on Netflix December 24

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

Everything is vile. We know this. I am a former news obsessive who now just reads the paper once a week because I’ve reached my limit for daily outrage and disappointment. Doubly so because there’s not too much to do about it when our government (regardless of which party is running the show) and large corporations pretend that everything is fine. Meanwhile, temperatures get warmer and anyone who isn’t a billionaire loses out. It’s pretty bleak out there. So here comes Adam McKay with a new social satire to remind us...how bad things are?

The question I turned over and over in my mind while watching this was...who is this supposed to be for? McKay seems to be aiming to skewer anti-science conservatives on the issue of global warming by using a comet on a direct hit path toward earth as a stand in for the real issue. But with it’s parade of vocal liberal celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence, those people will either not watch at all, or turn it off as soon as it is clear they are the butt of the joke. Which effectively defeats its purpose as political satire.

So if it is liberal gladhanding passing itself off as satire, that could be fine. It’s fun to laugh at those unwilling to think for anyone besides themselves and fear abstract concepts like “immigrants” and “critical race theory.” Except that it is longer than 2001: A Space Odyssey and is rarely funny. There’s one running gag that is chuckle-worthy, and a few other moments that made me laugh with recognition, but the joke-to-eyeroll ratio is entirely skewed in favor of turning Don’t Look Up into “Don’t Look Up From Your Phone.” It barely even functions as a parody of other disaster movies. So that’s two marks against it.

Every scene in Don’t Look Up vibrates at the most obnoxious, self-congratulatory tone. The initial news of the comet’s impact is delivered on a “aren’t we all just having a good time” morning news show and Jennifer Lawrence’s grad student character gets turned into a meme for being hysterical. It’s not that these things seem unrealistic, but it’s basic observational humor without any actual bite. Even as someone who ostensibly agrees with the movie’s aims, I felt scolded by celebrities who talk about climate change and still hang out on yachts. If anything, Don’t Look Up is exactly the kind of thing conservatives bemoan about their portrayal in the media. It’s not that I am opposed to this kind of slant, but there’s nothing clever here. It feels like the last 10 years of late night humor recycled and fed back to those who just want to hear their own opinions reflected back at them. It’s a film for liberals the same way that Ghostbusters: Afterlife is a movie for those who love the original Ghostbusters, except with even less sincerity behind it. If I wasn’t writing this review, I would have walked out after 20 minutes, and the following two hours just gave me a headache from being locked in an echo chamber. I hope they at least spent some Netflix money on carbon offsets.