We’ve seen a lot of ‘end of the world’ disaster movies in our times and most of them star Will Smith, trying to make sense as he sifts through the rubble of the Statue of Liberty, while we stare at the big screen chomping popcorn. But our world has changed…and the disaster films are becoming more a true-life probability. So perhaps that’s why there’s been so much disdain for Adam McKay’s latest Netflix masterpiece, Don’t Look Up. People don’t want to know what they don’t want to know…
Billed as a comedy (or at the very least a dramedy) it’s not too dissimilar to McKay’s past mockery films Vice or The Big Short this time trading in mortgage markets for low level scientists (Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) who wind up on a wacky media tour after discovering a comet that will destroy planet Earth.
The lead actors’ sincerity is anything but funny. Scientists are scoffed and laughed at in real life where folks find more security in reading some guy-in-nowhere-land’s post with his pull-from-his-ass data on Global warming.
Yes, alternative facts, fake news and the like, cover Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truths’ of our present-day world. And that’s why this is so spot-on genius.
More scary is the fact that brilliant and amusing performances from Meryl Streep, as the President, Jonah Hill as her dumb-wit son, and Cate Blanchett as a knockoff Fox morning show personality are based on real life people.
Sure, the movie descends into ‘camp’ but it’s brilliant and frightening film about the truths of our stupidity slapping us in the face. Funny thing…It was about a decade ago that I realized just how stupid we’ve really become when New Jersey’s ‘Snooki’ read her first book and decided the next day “I could do that…write…” and published a memoir shortly after. Sigh.