Don’t Look Up review: Jennifer Lawrence is back
to business in this punchy, funny climate change satire
The same facet of her personality that made her
Hollywood’s ‘cool girl’, obsessed over and ridiculed in equal measure, has also
proven to be her greatest strength as an actor
Clarisse
Loughrey
Friday 24
December 2021 12:03
If anyone’s
the right person to deliver the news that the world is ending, it’s Jennifer
Lawrence. There’s always something firm and direct about her performances –
free of florid mannerisms, or the impulse to romanticise suffering. The same
facet of her personality that made her Hollywood’s “cool girl”, obsessed over
and ridiculed in equal measure, has also proven to be her greatest strength as
an actor. In short, Lawrence doesn’t bullsh**t. Neither does her character in
Adam McKay’s punchy, funny satire Don’t Look Up.
Kate
Dibiasky is an astronomy grad student who’s desperately trying to convince the
world that a comet is about to hit the Earth and destroy all human life.
There’s nothing particularly flashy about the role – the big, awards-bait
monologue goes to her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Kate’s professor
with the kind of twitchy feverishness that he’s always excelled in. But as the
heavily publicised return from her acting sabbatical, it’s perfect. Kate faces
person after person unwilling to accept their impending doom. The look of
disgust that creeps over Lawrence’s face, as if someone were slowly lowering
her hand into a bucket of pond slime, made me realise exactly how much I’ve
missed watching her on screen.
When Kate
goes to the White House with photographic evidence that the comet she
discovered will hit Earth and trigger an extinction-level event, do they
immediately pull an Armageddon and muster a crew to nuke the thing into
oblivion? Of course not. The midterms are coming up, and with President Janie
Orlean (Meryl Streep) already trying to manage the blowback from her
controversial Supreme Court nominee, news of an apocalypse won’t reflect well
in her numbers. “Let’s sit tight and assess,” she ultimately rules, in an
exquisitely painful sequence where McKay amplifies the tension by
intermittently zooming in on DiCaprio’s panic-stricken baby blues and Streep’s
elegant hands brushing back hair. And though the impulse might be to look for a
Trump comparison, Orlean is really some hideous hybrid of every modern
president, Democrat and Republican, all of them guilty at some point of bowing to
self-interest.
No one else
is of much help – the media’s fixation on commodifying the truth is captured in
the ghoulish hyena cackles of daytime talk-show hosts Brie Evantee (Cate
Blanchett) and Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry). Mark Rylance’s timorous, Willy Wonka-adjacent
tech CEO Peter Isherwell inevitably starts to wonder whether the comet can be
monetised. His presentations begin with a warning to the audience that there
should be no direct eye contact, coughing, or negative facial expressions. Who
could he possibly be based on?
There’s
nothing subtle about Don’t Look Up. It’s a clear-cut metaphor for the climate
crisis – hence the use of DiCaprio, a well-known activist in the field. It also
applies somewhat to the pandemic. But obviousness has been the mark of McKay as
a filmmaker since he switched from straight comedies, like Anchorman and Step
Brothers, to the political didacticism of The Big Short and Vice. Those last
two played a little too much like slideshow lectures on the financial crisis
and War on Terror – occasionally smug or patronising in tone. Don’t Look Up is
an ideal middle ground, detached enough from reality that it can function as
pure satire, with the obviousness of it all only further fuelling the
absurdity. The film pitches a small group of sensible protagonists – Lawrence,
DiCaprio, Rob Morgan’s coolheaded Nasa official, and Timothée Chalamet’s
skateboarding GenZer – against some of the most terrifying veneers ever put on
film, all puffed-up parodies of the capitalistic drive. And it does very well
to capture the feeling that the entire world is losing its mind.
Though the impulse might be to look for a Trump
comparison, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) is really some hideous hybrid of every
modern president, Democrat and Republican
Ariana
Grande pops up at one point, essentially playing herself, and delivers a song
that features the chorus “We’ve really f***ed up.” There’s something oddly
satisfying about the way McKay's film lets us laugh at our own doom.
‘Don’t Look
Up’ is out on Netflix now
I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures
the madness I see every day
Peter
Kalmus
A film about a comet hurtling towards Earth and no one
is doing anything about it? Sounds exactly like the climate crisis
‘The Earth system is breaking down now with
breathtaking speed.’
Wed 29 Dec
2021 14.08 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/29/climate-scientist-dont-look-up-madness
The movie
Don’t Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I
can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it’s also the most
accurate film about society’s terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I’ve
seen.
The film, from
director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad
student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy
(Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will
impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as
certain as just about anything in science.
The
scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by
society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation
that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a
bathroom; in another, Dibiasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being
clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what
it feels like to be a climate scientist today.
The two
astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep),
who is glad to hear that impact isn’t technically 100% certain. Weighing
election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to “sit tight and
assess”. Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the
TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity
breakup story).
By now, the
imminent collision with comet Dibiasky is confirmed by scientists around the
world. After political winds shift, the president initiates a mission to divert
the comet, but changes her mind at the last moment when urged to do so by a
billionaire donor (Mark Rylance) with his own plan to guide it to a safe
landing, using unproven technology, in order to claim its precious metals. A
sports magazine’s cover asks, “The end is near. Will there be a Super Bowl?”
But this
isn’t a film about how humanity would respond to a planet-killing comet; it’s a
film about how humanity is responding to planet-killing climate breakdown. We
live in a society in which, despite extraordinarily clear, present, and
worsening climate danger, more than half of Republican members of Congress
still say climate change is a hoax and many more wish to block action, and in
which the official Democratic party platform still enshrines massive subsidies
to the fossil fuel industry; in which the current president ran on a promise
that “nothing will fundamentally change”, and the speaker of the House
dismissed even a modest climate plan as “the green dream or whatever”; in which
the largest delegation to Cop26 was the fossil fuel industry, and the White
House sold drilling rights to a huge tract of the Gulf of Mexico after the
summit; in which world leaders say that climate is an “existential threat to
humanity” while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production; in which major
newspapers still run fossil fuel ads, and climate news is routinely
overshadowed by sports; in which entrepreneurs push incredibly risky tech
solutions and billionaires sell the absurdist fantasy that humanity can just
move to Mars.
World leaders underestimate how rapid, serious and
permanent ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize
After 15
years of working to raise climate urgency, I’ve concluded that the public in
general, and world leaders in particular, underestimate how rapid, serious and
permanent climate and ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to
mobilize. There may only be five years left before humanity expends the
remaining “carbon budget” to stay under 1.5C of global heating at today’s
emissions rates – a level of heating I am not confident will be compatible with
civilization as we know it. And there may only be five years before the Amazon
rainforest and a large Antarctic ice sheet pass irreversible tipping points.
The Earth
system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. And climate scientists
have faced an even more insurmountable public communication task than the
astronomers in Don’t Look Up, since climate destruction unfolds over decades –
lightning fast as far as the planet is concerned, but glacially slow as far as
the news cycle is concerned – and isn’t as immediate and visible as a comet in
the sky.
Given all
this, dismissing Don’t Look Up as too obvious might say more about the critic
than the film. It’s funny and terrifying because it conveys a certain cold
truth that climate scientists and others who understand the full depth of the
climate emergency are living every day. I hope that this movie, which comically
depicts how hard it is to break through prevailing norms, actually helps break
through those norms in real life.
We need
stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from knowing what’s
coming while failing to act.
I also hope
Hollywood is learning how to tell climate stories that matter. Instead of
stories that create comforting distance from the grave danger we are in via
unrealistic techno fixes for unrealistic disaster scenarios, humanity needs
stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from collectively
knowing what’s coming while collectively failing to act.
We also
need stories that show humanity responding rationally to the crisis. A lack of
technology isn’t what’s blocking action. Instead, humanity needs to confront
the fossil fuel industry head on, accept that we need to consume less energy,
and switch into full-on emergency mode. The sense of solidarity and relief we’d
feel once this happens – if it happens – would be gamechanging for our species.
More and better facts will not catalyze this sociocultural tipping point, but
more and better stories might.
Peter
Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and
Spark a Climate Revolution
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