Don't Look Up

Genre: Drama, Comedy, Sci-Fi
Rating: 15
Warnings: Mild Gore

With a star-studded cast, a solid sci-fi concept and themes ripe for satire, Don't Look Up manages to be, well, definitely one of the films I have seen this year.

The concept of an asteroid large enough to wipe out humanity on a collision course with Earth, and the astronomers trying to get the world at large to understand, is a solid concept that could have been really interesting. Instead, we get lazy jokes about people only caring about vapid celebrity news, like one of those "kids these days would try to swipe the pages of a book like a phone" cartoon strips.

That trite and shallow satire is every more annoying in the face of the political theme. The President doesn't care about the asteroid, only her own corruption and ratings. Sounds good, but it's ruined by Jonah Hill, as her nepotism-hire son, doing his usual unfunny teen dude comedy routine.

With the suspension of disbelief broken already, the science part of the science fiction falls down too. NASA's footage is all public, so the asteroid couldn't have been top secret, and NASA does not need Presidential permission to launch rockets or redirect asteroids. The DART project, where a spacecraft was launched to redirect a large asteroid, began in 2018 and likely inspired Don't Look Up.

The ending is clear early on, but its slow inevitability is enjoyable. If the silly parts were removed, the pessimistic idea of just waiting for the end of the world would make for an interesting film. The ironic switch between Leonardo DiCaprio's and Jennifer Lawrence's characters' media abilities and reception is fun and funny; more focus on their characters' relationships would have been better, as DiCaprio's Dr Randall Mindy's relationships plotline is witty. Lawrence's Kate Dibiasky has some relationship time with Timothee Chalamet's Yule, which is far more entertaining than any of the news scenes or Hill's entire character.

​The most annoying part of this film, really, is that it isn't bad. It's just not good. It sits there, teetering between failure and the potential that the concept has. The main actors are great and there are some really strong satirical points, like the Bash capitalism and monopoly parody. But, ultimately, its stunted by its own childish humour. The whole "Don't Look Up" thing is a rushed montage and heavy-handed point about the deliberate ignorance of the right wing. The idea that mainstream groups of people would refuse to look at the sky and say that looking at the sky is propaganda is too far, even in a world with flat earthers and anti-vaxxers.

You can tell that the creators here were patting themselves on the back smugly from the very beginning, and perhaps if they hadn't been so immediately pleased with themselves they might have pushed past their first thoughts and made a clever film. With all the generic versions of things and people, it's amazing NASA allowed their name to be used. The post-credit scene is a giggle, if you can be bothered to wait that long.