Review of Don't Look Up (2021) by Siskus17 — 04 Jan 2022

What movie was everyone else watching? This is the worst Adam McKay film and possibly one of the worst films of all time. McKay was clearly on a Wes Anderson marathon before directing this schlock. Don’t Look Up has all the makings of a Wes Anderson film: intermittent visual cuts, over-the-top main characters, and comically mocking a serious topic while responsibly handling the topic’s severity. McKay takes all of these hallmarks and miraculously fumbles all of them by making the intermittent cuts as bizarre and irrelevant as possible, making everyone except the main characters unnaturally over-the-top, and having no respect for the topics parodied to the point that one can safely say Don’t Look Up was designed for the express purpose of exploiting American angst to make a quick buck. All of this incompetent bumbling works in heinous disharmony to create one of the most tone-deaf, out-of-touch and blunt student film projects ever shown to the public eye.

Don’t Look Up’s most glaring issue is how extremely the tone changes mid-scene. There are sharp turns from depressed to snarky, shattered hope to joking about a character being cheap, and instantaneous political flip-flopping. The worst part is that all of these instances mentioned are not the parody characters, these are the main characters experiencing these emotionally unintelligent and abrupt changes in mood and behavior. The parody characters are subject to so many moments like these that I don’t have enough space to list them all here, so I’ll just mention the outlandish Trump parody and her genuinely Jafar from Aladdin level of vile son, the racist military veteran, and the 30-years too old Elon Musk parody.

The doomsday scenario of Don’t Look Up is clearly intended to mock the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. First off, there has not been enough time between the pandemic and now for even a good parody director to mock the event or the people involved, especially with the emergence of the Omicron variant and how the first wave of shutdowns is still hurting many people. Don’t Look Up feeds on the anger and dread of those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic by dangling the idea that the pandemic could have been handled better in people’s faces. One would think that Adam McKay did this intentionally to antagonize a still divided USA, and one would likely be right with how many other social issues are mocked.

A particularly poorly handled pair of elements of society that Don’t Look Up mocks are Big Tech and social media and it handles both with all the tact and understanding one should expect from a cast and crew dominated by people above and beyond the age of 40. The simple message, as direct as the movie itself gives you, is “big technology is bad and you should feel bad for supporting it and social media is a cancer on society that is making everyone stupid.” While I personally agree with most of the latter sentiment, actually having the experience required to believe such, this message has been beat to death by every filmmaker since the late 2000s to resonate with other technology-fearing middle-aged people.

Speaking of middle-aged, Casting Director Francine Maisler has brought has-beens from the 00s to be paid to phone in nearly every line. I feel horrible for Leonardo DiCaprio because he at least seemed to try to act to the best of his ability, but nobody else came close to delivering a pizza let alone a performance. Jennifer Lawerence seemed genuinely confused with how her character was supposed to emote at most moments and Jonah Hill honestly could not fail acting in-character given how the character was clearly tailored with the intent that Jonah Hill would be playing him.

Overall, don’t watch Don’t Look Up if you have any taste. Even as a bad movie it’s not a watchable bad movie like The Room or Twisted Pair, it’s just an ignorant and emotionally stunted cash grab that is only hot because it was designed to be as contemporary as possible. I know I was hard on Adam McKay, but he has a long list of significantly better movies than this atrocity against filmmaking. Pick any other Adam McKay film and you’ll likely enjoy it, but as it stands only Adam McKay fanatics and politically-excited nut jobs can possibly enjoy something like this.