Posts about Don't Look Up
Rotten Tomatoes: 58% (65 critics) with 6.40 in average rating
Critics consensus: Don't Look Up aims too high for its scattershot barbs to consistently land, but Adam McKay's star-studded satire hits its target of collective denial square on.
Metacritic: 53/100 (21 critics)
As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie.
A cynical, insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it. Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.
-David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
McKay’s tone may be grating, even if you don’t have to look far to see some version of what he’s ranting about in the real world. That makes “Don’t Look Up” a different kind of disaster movie, where the threat isn’t what’s to come so much as the state of affairs as they now stand.
Some problems can’t be solved by celebrities alone, and the most subversive thing about “Don’t Look Up” is ultimately how — in its own impotent way — it weaponizes its wild star power to make that point. It isn’t smart enough to be a wakeup call or shocking enough to scare people straight, but in the early days of a century in which the world has become a farce of itself and comedians are the only people still afforded $75 million to make serious-minded original cinema, maybe all we can do with the time that remains is stare at our screens and lament how we got here.
As subject matter, it’s entirely necessary. There has been a curious dearth of movies that look intently at climate change, so McKay’s intentions are noble. But as he did with The Big Short and Vice, McKay lacquers Don’t Look Up with an impenetrable layer of smugness. Whatever broadly worthy message the movie has is drowned out by a parade of movie-star mugging and stale pop culture jokes.
“Don’t Look Up” might be the funniest movie of 2021. It’s the most depressing too, and that odd combination makes for a one-of-a-kind experience. Writer-director Adam McKay gives you over two hours of laughs while convincing you that the world is coming to an end.
-Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Frankly, it's almost enough just to watch them all run around in states that range from manic panic to Zen serenity while McKay employs his usual coterie of meta tricks and treats. But it's hard not to long for the shrewder movie that might have been: Not just a kooky scattershot look, but a deeper truer gaze into the void.
-Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly: B
All in all, those looking for genuinely sharp, cutting satire, would probably be best looking elsewhere – but as an amusing ensemble piece, Don’t Look Up nonetheless manages to be a largely enjoyable affair.
-Patrick Cremona, Radio Times: 3/5
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.
-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: 2/5
Don’t Look Up takes the pulse of contemporary life and finds it crazy, scary and, most of all, funny. It doesn’t all land but enough does to make it a sharp, bold, star-studded treat.
-Ian Freer, Empire: 4/5
You ever meet someone who shares all your opinions, but does so in such a tiresome and grating way that you begin rethinking your own point of view? That’s “Don’t Look Up” in a nutshell; a film with all the right things to say about how government, the media, and corporations ignore the emerging disaster of climate change, but couched within a satire so lumbering that it’s enough to turn a tree hugger into a pro-fracker.
Don’t Look Up is both types of blunt: It makes no bones about exactly what the filmmakers think of climate-change deniers and social-media distractions, and it repeatedly blunts the impact of its satire by calling its shots early, often, and loudly.
-Jesse Hassenger, The A.V. Club: C+
Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio and an amazing cast throw their talents behind the movie’s dark but disappointingly obvious humor.
-Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun Times: 2.5/4
When Don’t Look Up views its targets of scorn from a macro perspective, though, it plays more often like an extended, mediocre cold open to Saturday Night Live. Like that show, McKay’s film is inspired in stretches, but it’s by and large bland, unnecessarily bloated, and incredibly self-satisfied. And like Vice before it, it too often uses satire as a tool of castigation rather than as a means of truly taking on the status quo.
-Derek Smith, Slant: 2/4
it’s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon suddenly veered into solemnity, and then, in the entirely unearned closing scenes, sentimentality. It’s cheap, and crass, and by the conclusion, downright infuriating.
-Jason Bailey, The Playlist: D+
PLOT
Kate Dibiasky, an astronomy grad student, and her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy, make an astounding discovery of a comet orbiting within the solar system. The problem: it's on a direct collision course with Earth. The other problem? No one really seems to care. Turns out warning mankind about a planet-killer the size of Mount Everest is an inconvenient fact to navigate. With only six months until the comet makes impact, managing the 24-hour news cycle and gaining the attention of the social media obsessed public before it's too late proves shockingly comical -- what will it take to get the world to just look up?!
DIRECTOR
Adam McKay
WRITER
Adam McKay (story by McKay and David Sirota)
MUSIC
Nicholas Britell
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Linus Sandgren
EDITOR
Hank Corwin
BUDGET
$75 million
Release date:
December 10, 2021 (limited theater release)
December 24, 2021 (Netflix)
STARRING
Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr. Randall Mindy
Jennifer Lawrence as Dr. Kate Dibiasky
Rob Morgan as Dr. Clayton "Teddy" Oglethorpe
Jonah Hill as Jason Orlean
Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell
Tyler Perry as Jack Bremmer
Timothée Chalamet as Yule
Ron Perlman as Colonel Ben Drask
Ariana Grande as Riley Bina
Scott Mescudi as DJ Chello
Cate Blanchett as Brie Evantee
Meryl Streep as President Janie Orlean
