“Don’t Look Up” Is the Distraction It Warns Us About

Adam McKay’s celebrity-saturated satire is painfully ironic

The pandemic served as a breeding ground for celebrity-self importance. These acts of pseudo-nobility fall on a spectrum of obviousness, spanning from Gal Gadot singing “Imagine” to Bo Burnham: Inside. Adam McKay’s newest political satire Don’t Look Up falls much closer to the Gal Gadot side of the spectrum.

Don’t Look Up was hard to quantify, especially in reference to the criticism I had heard prior to watching it. It wasn’t as funny as some critics were declaring it, but it wasn’t as mind-numbingly cringy as others were. Some proclaimed that it would mark the end of constructive political satire, and others said that it would usher in a new era of poignant social commentary. Ultimately, Don’t Look Up is just not good enough to stir up anything of substance, be it for better or for worse.

The film follows two scientists (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) who discover a planet-annihilating comet hurtling toward the Earth. They struggle to warn a distracted and uncaring populous and a comically unprepared government as the planet’s remaining days count down.

Overall, this movie feels like a rushed rough draft that everyone decided to give the go-ahead to because they didn’t want to risk a later release in case America got tired of Alec Baldwinian Trump criticism. The editing is sloppy and irritating, the screenplay (though funny at times) desperately requires at least a couple rewrites, and the casting needs some serious rethinking (Meryl Streep as a cheap Trump caricature clad in Hillary attire? It doesn’t work).

Why was this movie made? Is it an allegory for climate change? Surely not, for that comparison would be so fundamentally flawed that one would hope that even McKay would know better. A critique of liberal news outlets? Unlikely, as this film feels like a two hour SNL sketch. A commentary on celebrity self-righteousness and American exceptionalism? If so, the irony is deafening.

Don’t Look Up doesn’t seem like it was made to be enjoyed by anyone except the people who made it. It treats its audience with an idiotic arrogance while trying to be self aware, and its commentary on social media is undoubtedly the most out-of-touch and pompous in the whole film. Anytime a Twitter montage flashes on the screen (it happens way too much), the content already feels dated, shallow, and unoriginal.

As one of the most polarizing films of 2021, it feels odd to finish it and realize that it just isn’t important enough to either detest or defend. If you’re reading this review, this movie wasn’t made for you, because you’re probably not a self-righteous celebrity who needs an ego boost to separate yourself from unthinking, screen-addicted sheeple masses. Don’t Look Up is not smart enough, shocking enough, nuanced enough, or emotional enough to say anything valuable about anything. As it satirizes a world saturated in distractions that prevent us from just looking up and recognizing real issues, it fails to realize that within reality, it is the distraction.

Don’t Look Up was released on December 24, 2021 and is currently streaming on Netflix.