Review of the film "Don't Look Up" - a caustic satire about the end of the world with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.
The new work of Adam McKay, author of Power and The Selling Game, is not so witty, but much more evil.
Graduate student Keith Dibiaski (Jennifer Lawrence), while working on her doctorate, notices a previously unknown space object on astronomical instruments. Joyful, she calls her colleagues to the laboratory, but the calculations of Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) will soon erase a smile from the faces of those who came. It turns out that a huge comet flies directly to the Earth - and if nothing is done, then it will kill all life on the planet with a probability of 99.7%. Having enlisted the support of NASA, scientists go to a meeting with the president (Meryl Streep), but she is more interested in dealing with political scandals than with a global threat. People simply ignore the news in the press, and when the government nevertheless begins to act, its ideas, frankly, are idiotic. It seems humanity is doomed.
In recent years, Adam McKay has made films in a very specific way: he took an important but difficult topic for the average viewer - like the financial crisis (“Selling Short”) or the mechanisms of the White House (“Power”) - and explained in simple words, with humorous infographics and other postmodern jokes that are usually devoted to long boring documentaries. In Don't Look Up, he seems to stick to the same style: quasi-documentary hand-held shooting, poignant dialogues, sudden stock footage and pop-up captions that seem to break the fabric of the film and turn the conversation into reality. But only the events are now fictional, a kind of fantasy on a topic that is understandable to absolutely any layman: a caustic satire on a pandemic reality, in which the government ignores obvious threats, and people are looking for conspiracy conspiracies where everything is actually transparent.
And such a change in context while maintaining the style is not in McKay's favor. If earlier all his dramatic foppishness was justified by the ponderousness of the material, now it looks somewhat foreign: as if they are trying too hard to explain to you what you knew before the beginning of the picture. Yes, the government will not move a finger until it is screwed up against the wall. Yes, the mainstream media try to make any news "comfortable" and do not want to scare people, even when absolutely necessary. Pop stars are dummies, the military are pompous idiots, multi-billionaires like Musk are not the saviors of humanity at all, but megalomaniac sociopaths. Conservatives and liberals only know how to swear on the Internet and make memes, they are not enough for anything else. With the latter, by the way, the film has a big problem: "Don't Look Up" in one episode demonstrates how the actions of the heroes affect the World Wide Web, and it is clear that McKay does not understand the culture of the Internet at all. Trying to show memeification of events, he looks like a distant relative from Odnoklassniki, sending demotivators to everyone on WhatsApp in 2021.
For two hours "Don't Look Up" rushes at the viewer with truisms, builds an exaggerated portrait of a post-view (or pre-meteorite) society, where all the familiar attributes are twisted to the maximum. Sometimes it's funny, almost always terribly ridiculous - but very rarely witty. But here's the trick: it seems that this time McKay is not trying to take wit. His main weapon now is a captivating, sincere anger towards everyone whom he makes fun of with such stubbornness. Politicians, businessmen, ordinary people, even liberal Hollywood, only looking for an excuse to create a new blockbuster on a relevant topic (that is, he laughs at himself too, fully realizing the opportunistic essence of his film). McKay shows humanity, which should not survive, and you, as a spectator, are surprised to find yourself thinking that you also support a comet. In this sense, the film is closer not even to "Power" with "Play for Fall", but to some "I've had enough!", Another armor-piercing and deeply embittered satire, which does not aim to be at all subtle.
“Don't look up” by its very existence says a lot about our world. Because how much it was necessary to bring an author like Adam McKay - a person clearly intelligent and sensitive to what is happening around - so that he dropped all formalities and made the movie so straightforward in its message? As if he was just tired of explaining something and realized his own powerlessness in front of the viewer, and therefore decided to simply kill humanity to hell, finally showing all his hopeless stupidity in bright colors. However, you can't really call him a misanthrope. When “Don't Look Up” finishes mocking everyone it can, the film suddenly unfolds from a completely new side - like a gentle melodrama about people trying to preserve the remnants of humanity in this crazy cruel world. Only towards the end do we understand why the director generally needed great artists like DiCaprio and Lawrence, and not comedians from SNL. For these small final scenes, where caustic irony fades into the background, hiding behind the history of little doomed people, that at the family table in the last seconds of their lives they finally understand why they existed at all.
The uneven intonation of the film mirrors the mood of the characters well - the whole film is running around in circles and desperately trying to prove something to someone, then falling into painful apathy, then losing their way due to their fallen popularity, they finally come to resignation with the world and themselves yourself. The lyrical, almost religious finale stands out strongly from everything that was in the picture before, and at the same time it feels the only correct one. And for this particular film, and, apparently, for humanity in general.
This article was sponsored by Douglas Owen
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