Astronomers Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky discover a 6-9 km wide comet and calculate that it will hit Earth directly in six months. They inform the authorities, but get a lukewarm reception from the US President Janie Orlean in the White House, who doesn't want to scare the voters. They appear at a TV news show, but the audience is more interested in their looks and reactions than in the danger approaching. The US launches a rocket with nuclear weapons to blow up the comet, but billionaire Isherwell cancels it because he found out the comet is composed out of valuable rare-Earth minerals, and thus he intends to let it approach Earth, to then blow it up into small pieces and collect the debris in the Ocean. Naturally, the drones launched at the comet malfunction. Mindy spends his last day with his ex-wife on a family dinner. Orlean, Isherwell and numerous other celebrities escape in a spaceship with cryogenic sleep to space, while the comet crashes on Earth, causing a mass extinction.
After several light and fun comedies, screenwriter and director Adam McKay turned towards more pessimistic, socially critical films which criticized human flaws, which culminated in "Don't Look Up", a movie where those flaws cause the extinction of the human race. However, unlike the razor sharp "The Big Short" and "Vice", where every scene had its purpose and inspiration, here McKay lost his sense for the concise and turned slightly banal and heavy-handed in preaching its message across. "Don't Look Up" shows once again that themes alone don't make a movie. The themes here—modern people became so lazy that they rather ignore a pressing problem than to tackle it in time; denial of an inconvenient truth (ostrich effect); the superficial masses interested more in someone's appearance and distracting Internet gratifications than real-life problems; obfuscation of truth; Capitalism and profit getting in the way of an expensive, but necessary solution—are noble and valuable, especially since they allegorically talk about the climate change, but the execution is far below them. There are too many silly, trivial caricature moments that don't ring true.
Also, it seems it is impossible to make a comedy out of a doomsday event—even the similar "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" tried, but was only semi-successful. One of the best moments is when the two protagonists, Randall and Kate, appear on a TV news show and warn people of the impending comet crash, but the reactions of the audience is only focused on irrelevant stuff, like making an Internet meme out of Kate running away from the studio in anger, and inventing a hashtag A.I.L.F. ("Astronomer I'd like to f***") for Randall. Another good moment is when the US President Orlean speaks in front of an audience, to try to incite them to ignore the comet visible in the sky: "They want you to look up because they want you to be afraid! They are looking down their noses at you!", which is a sly jab at ignoring the common sense in the name of political spite, fake defiance and contrarianism. The "killer ending" would have worked better without the bizarre post-credits scene, though, and the running time is overlong, without the great humor we were used from McKay from before. "Don't Look Up" is a good film, a cautionary tale about self-inflicting ignorance, though it is disproportionately more dedicated to its theme than its writing, ingenuity or style. "Queen Millennia" is still the best story about a possible reaction of the people to a hypothetical collision of Earth with a foreign object.
Grade:++
No comments:
Post a Comment