‘Do not look up’ comes as the last great Netflix film premiere of this 2021 that is about to reach its end. With a cast full of Hollywood stars and a most striking premise, the new work of Adam McKay It has everything to become another bombshell of that streaming platform.
What he is not going to achieve is unanimity, since it is a film that is dividing both critics and audiences, something to a certain extent logical because it is a work that says a lot about today’s society. But it is one thing to be very inspired by what is being criticized and another to be inspired by the way of doing it. That’s where the problems arise for a tape that at the same time he oversteps and falls short in his satire.
Laughing at today’s society
It is not difficult to find parallels between the management carried out in ‘Do not look up’ about the inexorable arrival of a comet that is going to destroy life on Earth with other crises that we already have much more assimilated such as climate change, where the Denialism has always had its share, or that of coronavirus.
All trying take it to the absurd, something that works quite well in its initial stages, since information is despised by political power because it simply does not suit them to let it be known. At the end of the day, no one is going to accept a (almost) 100% chance that they will die in a matter of months.
Already in the previous minutes we had several clues that indicated that we were going to attend a movie that handled the idea of the end of the world in a very different way from other productions such as ‘Armageddon’ or ‘Deep Impact’, to mention two works with the same threat and complementary approaches, more playful in the film of Michael Bay and much more dramatic in that of Mimi leder.
Here we opt for a style that fits with what has been seen in the last works – although more ‘The big bet’ than ‘The vice of power’ – by Adam McKay, with occasional leaks towards an absurdity that is more reminiscent of his first feature films. The result is somewhat strange, as he points out problems very well and laughs at them, but does so in somewhat hasty ways, such as if you wanted to go too quickly to the next nonsense you want to point out.
Less fun than expected
There I think ‘Don’t look up’ could have worked better with another cast more used to working in a comic key. And it’s funny, because I think in isolation about the protagonists of the film and I can’t say anything bad about them, but I’m also aware that Jonah hill It is the one that is most comfortable in the register that McKay proposes, while the rest fit well in what the film asks of them in terms of representation – in some cases it could not be more evident what their great reference in the real world is – but then it often feels like they’re doing it in a very measured way when the movie itself pulls further into the wild.
That does not mean that there are very funny moments, from more specific and direct jokes such as everything related to Ron Perlman to others of greater length such as the obsession of the character of Jennifer Lawrence with not understanding how a high fee charged him for something that was free or the tendency to hood the characters by the authorities, but there are also situations that simply have very little grace. Although there I recognize that the fact that fiction sometimes does not surpass reality can work against it.
There I would have appreciated one more point of measure to let the situations he proposes breathe better. Seeing ‘Don’t look up’, I couldn’t help but remember ‘The smoke screen’, a stupendous satire all too forgotten today that also looked at something very recent – in that case the sex scandal of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky– to play with a crazy game and get out of the game.
In that case, it was essential to give the appropriate development to the producer played by Dustin Hoffman so that he would function as a great common thread of all the crazy things that were happening in that invented war, but there is nothing really comparable here. Yes, Lawrence and Leonardo Dicaprio They would come to fulfill that function, but they also end up getting lost in that over-accumulation of ideas that ‘Don’t look up’ boasts.
Lights and shadows of ‘Don’t look up’
With everything, there are specific moments in which McKay comes dangerously close to hitting the bullseyeBut he doesn’t do it because he pays special attention to that particular topic, but because it makes it sound so dangerously familiar that this tendency to excess is already enough for the satire to work. Here the subtlety is not of interest in any case, perhaps that is why the more absurd something is – I think, for example, in that first post-credits scene as a conclusion to something that we had been told before – the brighter it has because it already was. so standard.
In this way, the bad blood that ‘Don’t look up’ has, passing us by the fact that our distrust of science is unjustified and that we have become a society that prioritizes the banal over everything else ends up being watered down. Sometimes because it is too obvious and sometimes because it is underdeveloped. The blow towards what laughs is there, because the objective is very clear, but What could be an unforgettable slap turns out to be little more than a slap.
In short
All in all, ‘Don’t Look Up’ is a movie that worth seeing. It is clear to me that some viewers will find it a brilliant satire, while others will end up desperate for the approach taken. I stay in between, I see and applaud what he tries, but the execution is not exactly the best.