REVIEW: Don't Look Up

The premise of Netflix's new film, "Don't Look Up," is simple: two scientists discover a giant comet that is absolutely going to collide into earth, and the people of the world need to be warned. Telling people that the world is going to end is the easy part. The hard part is getting them to take it seriously.

The media circus surrounding the end of the world is made only more hilarious seen through the eyes of our main characters: soft-spoken Professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo Dicaprio) and slightly disaffected grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence). It says a lot about the writing of this movie that even with the apocalypse just on the horizon, our protagonists with their complex inner lives keep us anchored in the conflict, never distracting us from it.

But despite the writing and performances, the film still can't escape the flaw inherent in its design. While most of the film's targets (politicians, clickbait editorials, etc.) are justifiably, satisfyingly raked across the coals, the film skirts around the uncomfortable truth: As a piece of media, "Don't Look Up" is built on the very performativity it pretends to disavow. Would this movie have been made if even the third-tier characters weren't padded with names like Timothee Chalamet and Ariana Grande? The film even spins an entire plot thread around how even middle-aged Leonardo Dicaprio is still pretty sexy, right?

Social commentaries like these also hinge on the audience's desire to see themselves in the only sane person in the room--if only people would just listen to what I have to say. This film not only inevitably perpetuates a narcissistic fantasy of martyrdom in the audience--it depends on it. Narcissism becomes something of a final sanctuary for the viewer: the world's going to end, but at least I know that I'm the final vestige of intelligence and competency.

Just so, I would be remiss to not acknowledge that the film does make an earnest attempt at profundity, even sincerity. In between its lambasting of politics and performance, the film does sneak in brief glimpses of what we have to lose if this world were to explode. The story also features one of the most moving presentations of prayer I've seen put to film.

The film does its best with the inescapable contradictions of the genre. For that, I can't fault it.

--The Professor

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