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MIKE AT THE MOVIES: Aiming Broadly, Don’t Look Up Hits Nothing Squarely

by MIKE ORLOCK

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Adam McKay has made two of the best satires of recent years: The Big Short (2015), a big hit at the box office and on the awards circuit, skewered the rampant greed of Wall Street brokers who broke the world economy back in 2008; and Vice (2018), his barbed biopic of former VP Dick Cheney, shotgunned the Bush administration’s bungled handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Cheney more or less supervised. 

McKay is back in theaters and streaming on Netflix with Don’t Look Up (R), a satire of apocalyptic proportions that aspires to be this generation’s Dr. Strangelove but too often settles for being last year’s greatest missed opportunity, especially when you consider the cast McKay was able to assemble: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Tyler Perry, Melanie Lynskey and several others in walk-on roles. 

With a cast this great comes the burden of great expectations, but the script, which McKay concocted with David Sirota, never quite establishes a coherent tone, even though the setup is promising enough: DiCaprio and Lawrence play two astronomers who discover a new asteroid the size of Mount Everest that’s hurtling through space and about to enter our solar system. 

They crunch some numbers and come to a 99.9% positive conclusion that the asteroid is going to collide with Earth, killing the planet. When they take this news public, the doofus president (Meryl Streep) and her equally dense son (Jonah Hill), playing broad parodies of Don and Don Jr., turn the planet’s imminent demise into politics that divide the country into science believers – those who want to do something to save the planet – and science deniers, who recommend people ignore the threat and “don’t look up.”

The 24/7 cable-news networks, personified by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as co-hosts of a Fox-like opinion show, trump up the misinformation campaign to pump up their ratings. Meanwhile, Mark Rylance, playing a tech guru who’s also the richest man in the world, schemes to mine the asteroid for minerals that will make him a zillionaire.

McKay has stated that his target is climate change, which he claims will kill the planet as surely as an asteroid will, but his metaphor has closer satirical application to the COVID-19 pandemic that’s still roiling the world. Too bad he didn’t narrow his focus and follow the science of good satire: If you aim too broadly, you miss hitting anything squarely. Don’t Look Up should sting, but it barely tickles. 

In another lifetime, Mike Orlock wrote film reviews for the Reporter/Progress newspapers in the western suburbs of Chicago. He has also taught high school English, coached basketball and authored three books of poetry. He currently serves as Door County’s poet laureate.