Don't Look Up (2021) We'd have to go back to Stanley Kubrick's immortal 1964 "Dr. Strangelove" as a point of comparison to this one........depicting a world populated with so many imbeciles and egotistical knaves that the utter destruction of Earth at their incompetent hands seems well deserved and inevitable......
Like "Strangelove" you can laugh your ass off all the way through it, as you gasp at how accurately it depicts the lunacy and ignorance that's torn through today's modern society like an out of control, metastasizing cancer.
Try to imagine those two dueling 'giant comet hits the earth' movies from 1998, "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" if they were re-done as feature length Saturday Night Live skits.......but with far more simmering anger underneath the blunt satire and gags........
Writer director Adam McKay, creator of the brutal eviscerations of Dick Cheney ("Vice") and Wall Street economy destroyers ("The Big Short") takes no prisoners here. Aided and abetted by top-of-the-line film superstars and a Marvel-sized budget, he sprays acid-tipped satirical bullets like concentrated machine gun fire. Scientists, politicians, celebrities, social influencers, journalists, multi-media figures all go down hard under McKay's withering, relentless assault.
A few of the targets may finally finish up with some measure of humanity and dignity.......but in a world this filled to the brim with chicanery and foolishness, nobody's getting out alive......
A young astronomy PhD (Jennifer Lawrence) and her mentor-professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) do their very damndest to warn the world about a comet hurtling on a collision path with Earth......a chunk of rock whose direct hit on the planet will insure an extinction level event.
But given our current divisive ruptures of sanity on every strata of society, the exasperated duo's dire news is greeted at every turn with ignorance, apathy, derision and denial.
Humanity's basic instinct for self-preservation barely crosses the minds of almost everyone they encounter........including the duplicitous poll-obsessed U.S. President and her equally idiot son (Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill, whose characters act like a mad, mad blend of Trump and all his larva put together,)
Also popping up in this myriad of of morons......morning talk-show twits (Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry), a singing celeb bobblehead (Ariana Grande), a General who who dupes White House visitors by charging them for free snacks (Paul Guilfoyle) and most importantly to the plot, a high-tech, Steve Jobs-like titan, (Mark Rylance) whose helium-voiced 'Mr. Rogers' persona masks his true greedy malevolence.
Our only real quibbles with "Don't Look Up" would come from its sheer length and repetition.......McKay hammers away at all the subjects of his considerable wrath for well over 2 hours.......and after the 90 minute mark (about the running time of 'Dr. Strangelove') you may feel that he's more than made his point......over and over again.
We laughed and cringed in equal measures all the way through it, so for us, the film accomplished its ambitious goals and then some......and held up a huge funhouse mirror to the way we live now. (When you watch its mobs of deniers refusing to gaze skyward at the doom racing toward them, you can't help comparing them to our very real anti-vaxxers, who can't wait to clog up hospitals to die of Covid..)
BQ says mark it as a essential viewing for this year.....4 stars (****). (And as in any Marvel epic, make sure to stay to very tail end of the credits for one last blast of well aimed snark.....)
And by all means, look up.
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