What an apposite satire Don’t Look Up movie is! It is a flick crafted on exaggeration in order to make a point, and the point gets delivered loud and clear.
A thing about satires – it will always have one big chunk of audiences busy nullifying its existence, primarily because it was targeted at them. They will always deny their part in it saying, “No we don’t behave like that.” But that’s the funny thing, it is exactly the way they would behave.
If history has taught us anything, it is our demented unrestrained reaction to calamities or outages. Brings to mind a cockroach in a restaurant story to capture the behavioral symptoms of different types of people in a room. On one hand, there is one who would flip out screaming, whilst there is the second one, that calm waiter who lifts it and dispenses it away without throwing any tantrums.
Don’t Look Up bases itself on countless other human emotions. For the better part on denial, then moving towards leveraging a cataclysmic event by being greedy, and then eventually flipping out to drift towards being utterly selfish. How apt! Humans in a nutshell.
The Theme of Don’t Look Up Movie
Directed by Adam McKay, the bloke who had directed The Big Short movie, Don’t Look Up is more of an aftermath of a comet sighting that is likely to hit planet Earth. It is dictated in the contemporary world via the eyes of two astronomers who are trying to warn an unhearing domain. The movie tries to scour all the natural possible areas that one would tap into when tacked against a calamity. The way various sectors react in the face of a crisis primarily builds the foundation of the story.
Don’t Look Up often meets dark humor in trying to convey its message. The way important people react to the news of imminent mass extinction seamlessly plays out as content. The story writes itself. You can’t help but wonder if tomorrow you were to walk in with such a piece of colossal news, will you be heard at all? Will you even get a shot? More importantly, do you even have a voice in today’s chaotic world?
Somewhere deep down you know that in today’s world, every news is a hoax. Truth is contorted to sound more entertaining and appealing. It is all about the TRPs and how much traffic one is garnering by presenting the spiciest of news.
Up Close and Personal (Spoilers Ahead)
The movie lets you walk into the shoes of the protagonists to make you experience their frustration and helplessness firsthand. It is sad to see the duo carrying such a piece of colossal news with them and not getting taken seriously. I mean what do you have to be taken seriously for crying out loud? What exactly should be the matter of concern if not the end of all life?
The movie taps into every possible area where a piece of news like that might possibly ruffle some feathers. It begins shaping as a political agenda before moving on to the media, and then eventually the social response.
Don’t Look Up mocks issues that shouldn’t have been aggrandized in the first place like something as trivial as the breakup or patch-up of a renowned singer. While there lies a daunting issue at hand, the media gives importance to pointless stories for their ratings. Ratings again are in turn dependent on what viewers want to watch.
Half-cooked measures are taken by the politicians that too when being pushed into the corner. Then eventually a billionaire Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) swoops in with a hysteric possibility of extracting minerals from the comet. All of it adds up to become reasons of failure to upend the disaster.
Leonardo DiCaprio
While Leonardo DiCaprio was an obvious choice for the movie, given the amount of environmental work he does, what he brings to the table is a common man in the form of Dr. Randall Mindy. The character of Randall has his dreams too.
He has never tasted fame before. With the onset of a comet, it couldn’t have been a less opportune time for him to get a taste of the fame medicine. But that fame is again for all the wrong reasons. Being tagged with a brand of a ‘sexy scientist guy’ he ends up being appreciated for something he did not expect.
Human as he was he starts to flounder making all the wrong choices. Only to realize that sex like fame is temporary, and that love is the feeling that matters.
In the final moments when he apologizes to his wife, she forgives him instantly, only to whisper that she had not been loyal to him either. The fact that it didn’t matter, that he chooses to see the bigger picture of them holding hands toward the end makes you realize some things don’t work, but you have to make them work.
Like in most movies, Leo gets his venting-out shot in this one too, where he delivers a great performance trying to open up some deliberate shut eyes. Making us realize why he is such a good actor once again. But if you really look at it, it isn’t and never was primarily a Leo movie. It was about the issue that the director was trying to highlight, and it feels more like Leo simply played along.
Meaningless and Meaningful Things in Don’t Look Up
What Adam McKay also does is use the Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) angle to show how abysmal love has ended up becoming. How love is opportunistic in today’s world. How shallow!
Randall gets to have a piece of it only to realize that very soon he would become yet another of Brie’s temporary fling. That wasn’t him, it wasn’t his life. What he had was far better, for which he gets punished severely for cheating.
A contrasting image is painted through the shortest of flings between Yule (Timothee Chalamet) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence). Even after knowing how little time they had left, Yule still goes an extra mile to let Kate know about his feelings for her with Kate reciprocating. It is a great contrast very fitting to the Brie – Randall angle where one had a foundation of a sham, while the other was built on genuine thoughts.
Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill
A lot of things in the movie are done for sheer effect. Exaggerating truth to squeeze out a joke. One of those examples was the relationship between President Orlean played by Meryl Streep with her son Jason Orlean Jonah Hill.
The president forgetting about her son is probably the most satisfying end their irritating bit could meet. Later on, toward the conclusive bits before and after the credits, you get to see Jason still alive, while President is killed by a dinosaur-like creature. A lot of exaggeration there, but it just goes on to end some loops and probably point out that maybe Jason didn’t deserve it. He was just in a royal position and had learned an extravagant irresponsible way of life that came with the position.
Maybe he has a shot after all his beliefs about all the good and permanent things in life being obliterated in front of his eyes, trying to spell out a message that maybe it is not too late for the younger generation who take life for granted or consider their positions a privilege. Stay in the shadows of someone for their entire lives so much that they forget they have a voice too.
The Final Verdict
Goes on without saying, nobody likes to talk about themselves in a bad way. Everyone is a hero in their lives. When someone portrays them as a villain, it is hard to swallow the truth. Don’t Look Up ends up doing that, and there are a lot of people who do not appreciate the way the spotlight hits them.
In terms of exaggeration, the movie often sounds stupid and too hard to believe, maybe miles away from reality for some. One might also complain as to why the movie only shows one side of the coin. But wasn’t that the whole point? The whole motive of creating it in the first place was that it was spelled out so you avoid such thinking.
It wasn’t supposed to be an apt reality, but more of an awakening call. If you don’t bring that out in the open, people might still continue to behave that way. There would still remain in existence the irrational thinking that the movie is trying to dissipate away. A job well done at that!
The title Don’t Look Up itself is a jab at this human behavior of how we don’t see things that are right there. People in the movie did not take things seriously until the comet became conspicuously visible to the naked eyes. That’s when the protagonists got taken seriously even they had all the facts with them. Nobody believed them, went on to make fun of them as well.
When will we learn to understand science based on data and analytics? The fact that there is global warming, that the climate is changing at a precarious rate.
That inevitably poses the question of when will we learn to look up?
Don't Look Up
Pros
- Extraordinary Satire
- Great plot
- Good performances
Cons
- One side of the coin
- Too much exaggeration
