The premise of this one is that a comet the size of a mountain is on a collision course with Earth, and if it isn’t diverted somehow, every living creature will be killed within the next two hundred days.  There were sev­eral movies along these lines in 1998: Deep Impact was also about a kil­ler comet, Armageddon was about a kil­ler asteroid, and Last Night was about an unspecified apocalypse with a known date.  Then of course in 2011 came Melancholia, with Earth doomed to be hit by a rogue planet.  The twist in Don’t Look Up is that when scientists alert the public to the approach of the com­et and the fact that the end of life on Earth is less than a year away, it becomes just another controversy: one group demands that something be done, another dismisses the comet as a hoax, and most people follow the media’s lead in paying much more attention to pop stars’ relationship drama than to the imminent end of the world.

There is some good satire here.  The idea that those who deny the existence of the comet would respond to its appearance in the sky by making an article of faith out of never looking up, to the point of wearing campaign buttons emblazoned with an arrow pointing down, is clever and feels depressingly accurate.  I’m as­suming that, given the lead times necessary to make a big-bud­get movie, Don’t Look Up was supposed to be an allegory for the way humanity in general and the U.S. in particular have respond­ed to the anthropogenic breakdown of the climate, but it also works very well for the covid pandemic, when the president’s response to the surging number of covid cases was to demand that we stop testing for covid.  (We’re seeing that again now, as his administration’s response to bad economic data has been to curtail the collection of economic data.)  We also had millions of people flaunting their defiance of science by rejecting the covid vaccine in favor of gulping down horse dewormer, then rejecting vaccines in their entirety, leading to measles outbreaks a quarter of a century after the disease was declared eliminated in the U.S.  Another bit that seemed right on the money: that the mission to divert the comet would be aborted when an influential tech oli­garch passes along the word that capturing the comet would re­sult in a windfall of rare earth elements useful in building smart­phones.  The blithe dismissal of concerns that the technology involved in breaking up and har­nessing the cometary nucleus is unproven also rings all too true.  There’s also some good film­making here, especially at the beginning⁠—this looked like it was going to be really compelling right up to the point that the two astronomers who serve as our protagonists are brought to the White House.

The White House is where the movie stumbles in a big way.  Much of the movie is devoted to the president, a sex-swapped parody of Donald Trump: she’s a septuagenarian Youtuber whom our idiocracy has elevated to chief executive, and when the as­tronomers are brought to D.C. to tell her about the comet, she’s embroiled in a scandal in which her Supreme Court nominee has turned out to be a former porn actor with whom she was having webcam sex from the White House.  There are at least four prob­lems with this.  One is simply that Trump cannot really be paro­died.  Real life repeatedly outpaces attempts to exaggerate the depths to which Trump and his flunkies will sink.  For instance, the movie tries to portray the president’s chief of staff, who is also her son, as too immature to even behave like an adult, let alone hold a position of power:

Or take the press secretary responding to a reporter’s question about the location of a proposed summit meeting:

Except that one isn’t from the movie⁠—that’s real life.  How do you parody that?  How do you parody a president who responds to a “No Kings” protest by posting a computer animation of him­self wearing a crown, flying a fighter jet, and bombarding the protesters with tankfuls of fecal matter?  How do you parody the idea of the president bringing in a demolition crew to do a tear­down of the White House?  When this movie tries, we leave the realm of cerebral satire and are instead just doing one of those Pattern 45 “aren’t these people awful?” comedies.  This type of comedy is hard to take, which is problem two.  Problem three is that the shift makes for a significant tonal clash, and problem four is that every step into the world of caricature makes the satire seem less like it’s directed at the real world.  The prem­ise of the movie⁠—that people would react to an urgent threat to all life on Earth with denial and greed and solipsism, and thus fail to save themselves⁠—is almost certainly true, and that yawning gap between what we should be and what we are is the joke.  To see all these other kinds of jokes added on top was like going to a classical concert and barely being able to hear the music because it keeps getting drowned out by the sound of ringtones.  And it lets viewers off the hook to give them the opportunity to think, “Ha ha, that planet full of clowns got blown up!”  It’s worth let­ting go of a few of the broader jokes to make it clearer that we are Pagliacci.

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