'Don't Look Up' delivers a scathing satire that occasionally veers off course
CNN
In a grand science fiction tradition, "Don't Look Up" uses a disaster-movie framework as a metaphor for a reality-based crisis, with a huge comet hurtling toward Earth as a surrogate for indifference to addressing climate change. Yet this star-studded, extremely provocative satire at times veers off course itself, partially undermining its admirable qualities with the broadness of its tone.
At its core, writer-director Adam McKay (who wrote the script with journalist/activist David Sirota) delivers a very pointed treatise on the dysfunctional state of current politics and media, in which everyone is so myopic as to be unable to focus on an existential threat. The title reflects the inevitable endpoint of that, with a bury-your-head-in-the-sand approach to impending doom.
The window into that absurdity comes when astronomy professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his PhD. student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discover the comet, whose trajectory will lead to a direct collision with Earth in a little over six months.
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