Don’t Look Up

Don’t Look Up Review

It’s almost irrelevant that this is McKay’s worst film yet, because there’s something far more maddening about the promise of, the potential, and the importance that “Don’t Look Up” foists upon itself. This is, of course, about global warming, and how we’re not doing enough about it—a funny premise for a star-studded comedy with disturbing stakes. But McKay has filled this parable with hot air, wanting us to marvel at and then choke on its mediocre jokes.  Read full review…

Don’t Look Up review – slapstick apocalypse according to DiCaprio and Lawrence

Don’t Look Up finally upshifts into a mode of exaltation and transcendance, and I couldn’t help thinking of Lars von Trier’s 2011 planet-collision film Melancholia, which is similar. But for all its faults, Von Trier’s film chose a more interesting and disquieting mode of dark comedy (and I’m sorry that, in 2011, I didn’t see the connection with climate change). This film could have done something more convincing with that mode of reverse-vertigo hinted at in its title: that fear and willed blindness about what looms over us. But if the movie helps to do something about climate change, such critical objections are unimportant. Read full review…

Don’t Look Up Review: Leonardo DiCaprio And Jennifer Lawrence’s Film Hits The Right Buttons

DiCaprio and Lawrence are a delight to watch as they lead the charge with Blanchett and Streep providing the icing on the cake. It is a marvel that the actors and their director seem to be having so much fun in the act of painting a dark, disturbing portrait. Juxtaposing the sublime and the trivial, the cautionary and the tongue-in-cheek, the gleaming and the grey to drive home its point, Don’t Look Up is watchable all the way. Read full review…

Don’t Look Up review: Jennifer Lawrence is back to business in this punchy, funny climate change satire

There’s nothing subtle about Don’t Look Up. It’s a clear-cut metaphor for the climate crisis – hence the use of DiCaprio, a well-known activist in the field. It also applies somewhat to the pandemic. But obviousness has been the mark of McKay as a filmmaker since he switched from straight comedies, like Anchorman and Step Brothers, to the political didacticism of The Big Short and Vice. Those last two played a little too much like slideshow lectures on the financial crisis and War on Terror – occasionally smug or patronising in tone. Don’t Look Up is an ideal middle ground, detached enough from reality that it can function as pure satire, with the obviousness of it all only further fuelling the absurdity. The film pitches a small group of sensible protagonists – Lawrence, DiCaprio, Rob Morgan’s coolheaded Nasa official, and Timothée Chalamet’s skateboarding GenZer – against some of the most terrifying veneers ever put on film, all puffed-up parodies of the capitalistic drive. And it does very well to capture the feeling that the entire world is losing its mind. Read full review…

Don’t Look Up Review: An All Star Apocalypse in Adam McKay’s Satire

There can be a smugness and a lack of nuance to McKay’s work (Vice, we’re looking at you), but in Don’t Look Up’s defense, this is an incredibly contemporary film which clearly takes the standpoint that the time for nuance has passed. It’s a picture of an America which would literally destroy the entire planet because of individual selfishness. It might not be a message everyone wants to hear, but it’s the message McKay wants to tell and there’s something rather powerful and even noble about the sense of kinetic fury constantly in the background here.

So Don’t Look Up might not be for everyone, but it’s more than just another Netflix film. Think of it like a massive Hollywood Christmas special where the top talent comes together to scream, “We’re all going to fucking die” at the top of their lungs. Amen to that. Read full review…