Movie Review: 'Don't Look Up' is a Savage Satire of Modern Politics and Media

Don’t Look Up is a savage satire that pulls few punches in calling out those who would deny either COVID-19 or climate change. Playing like a modern Doctor Strangelove, the famously anti-war war movie, Don’t Look Up uses clever caricatures of modern politics to criticize and humiliate those who appear prepared to watch the world burn just to protect some ego born version of their political team, one they believe can’t lose no matter what winning might look like, even if it looks like the death of humanity.

Don’t Look Up stars Jennifer Lawrence as Kate Dibiasky, a doctoral candidate in Astrology at Michigan State University. As the film opens, Kate is watching the sky through a massive telescope. Here she spots a large comet that is on a track that is bringing it toward Earth. For a doctoral candidate, it’s a huge find so she immediately contacts her professor, Dr Randall Mindy, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. He begins to do the math on the trajectory of the comet and slowly it dawns on him, the comet is headed directly toward Earth.

With Kate in tow, Dr. Mindy begins calling anyone he can get a hold of in Washington D.C to warn the government about the comet. There are about 3 months before the comet will strike the Earth and destroy it. Dr Clayton ‘Teddy’ Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), a fellow Doctor and the head of the Earth Defense Force, a part of the government we are told is very real in on screen text, takes their call and confirms their findings, even as the head of NASA, who is a former lobbyist and not a scientist, would prefer they stop referring to the comet as a planet destroyer.

Teddy arranges for Dr. Mindy and Kate to come to Washington and join him as he briefs President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her Chief of Staff, her son, Jason Orlean (Jonah Hill). After ignoring the trio for hours, despite time being kind of important, they are unable to see the scientists until the following day. During this meeting even as they lay out how desperate and dire the situation is, neither the President nor her son can think of anything other than how a planet destroying comet might affect the midterm elections.

These scenes are masterfully exhausting and gut busting hilarious as Streep and Hill achieve remarkable comic heights of incompetence. The echoes of the War Room characters in Doctor Strangelove are loud in this scene and it is the first of several scenes where director Adam McKay’s satire of modern American politics and politicians really lands some punches. DiCaprio and Lawrence are equally brilliant in their apoplexy at the selfish, self-focused reaction they are getting from the people who they must rely on to try and prevent a world ending catastrophe.

I especially loved Jennifer Lawrence in this moment as Teddy falls silent and DiCaprio’s Dr Mindy tries to reason, she’s not having any of it. She is afraid of the world coming to an end and has no time for people who don’t recognize what’s at stake here. She and Jonah Hill have some very funny back and forth in Don’t Look Up and this is the first of those very funny, spiky exchanges. Lawrence provides the most realistic and thoughtful reaction to the comet and everything that happens to her is the true audience surrogate reaction to the strange and silly story playing out in all too real fashion.

From here, Don’t Look Up veers into media criticism as Kate and Dr. Mindy try to leak their information to the media only to get swept away in a storm of cable news punditry and ignorance and a disappointingly realistic social media reaction that is so funny it hurts. Much as the scene with the image obsessed President earned laughs through the too real echoes of the recent political reaction to COVID-19, the social media reaction is similarly painfully familiar.

I will cease with any further description of Don’t Look Up as I want you to see it for yourself. Some will not find this funny and I get it, it’s either implicating your view of the world and the issues of the pandemic or climate change at the heart of the satire or it hits too close to home, offering a dispiriting too realistic view of just how this might play out if a cataclysmic event were to strike the Earth.

Don’t Look Up opens in theaters on December 10th, 2021 and on Netflix on January 12th, 2022.