Director Adam McKay’s production company, Hyperobject Industries, with which he’s made his new film, Don’t Look Up, takes its name from the phenomenon first coined by professor and author Timothy Morton, for a concept so big and overwhelming it exceeds the limits of humanity’s understanding. Things that we just can’t get our heads around in their entirety: the English language, capitalism, oil spills. McKay, who made his name as the writer-director of Anchorman, Talladega Nights and (the still deeply underrated) The Other Guys, has gone on to make a number of films that attempt to squeeze huge, unwieldy concepts into tangible form: The Big Short, about the 2007 housing market crash; Vice, a darkly comic biopic of Former US Vice President Dick Cheney that unpicked the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; and now his star-studded satire Don’t Look Up, which is about the biggest hyperobject of our times: global warming.
Except Don’t Look Up is not about global warming. Or at least, not explicitly. It’s about two astronomers, Professor Randall Mindy (a nerdified Leonardo DiCaprio) and his PhD student Kate Dibiasky (a nerdified Jennifer Lawrence) who happen to notice, during a routine analysis of images from a giant telescope, that a comet large enough to destroy all life on Earth is headed right this way and will make impact in six months. All they need to do is let everyone know, and then the nations of the world will come together with one almighty hand-stack and work out what the hell to do about it.
Letting everyone know, it turns out, is the hard bit. Randall and Kate try the proper channels: an audience with Meryl Streep’s glossy President Orlean and her snide son (and also Chief of Staff) Jason, played, of course, by Jonah Hill; but the midterms are coming up, and President Orlean isn’t sure how defending against the coming apocalypse will poll. They try the media, putting in appearances on a daytime TV show, The Daily Rip, hosted by a pearly-toothed duo (Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett), who also can’t see how giant rocks obliterating all lifeforms will fit with their brand of light, news-based banter – especially when all eyes are on pop star Riley Bina (Ariana Grande) and her boyfriend DJ Chello (Scott Mescudi) and their extremely public, profile-raising relationship crisis.
As the end of the world draws ever nigh, the two scientists end up on diverging paths: decried as a meme-worthy crank for her passionate outbursts, Kate finds herself increasingly without a mainstream platform from which to broadcast her message, and finds solace in a group of crusty young nihilists, headed up by Timothée Chalamet’s Yule, who sports strange matted hair extensions that, were bigger questions not at hand, would be worthy of a discursive piece of their own.* Randall, deemed more telegenic and trainable, finds his doomy message softened and his (married) head turned. Even when the fact of the comet becomes indisputable – prompting a bigoted colonel (Ron Perlman) to volunteer for a high-profile suicide mission to blast it away with a rocket, whilst also attracting the attentions of wraith-like technocrat Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) – it is unclear if anyone can put their self-interest aside for long enough to do anything meaningful about it.
Of course, at the time of writing there isn’t a comet on a six-month collision course with Planet Earth. There is only the slow, painful, entirely self-inflicted demise that we are bringing upon ourselves, minute by minute, day by day, because we are too stupid, or too stubborn, or too selfish, to address the aforementioned hyperobject: climate change. As satirical vehicles go, swapping one planet-ending crisis for another isn’t the most subtle, as McKay himself fully admitted in a recent interview with Esquire, but he tends to favour head-bashing over chin-stroking when he has a point to make, and the message of Don’t Look Up is all-pervasive and all-consuming.
Which is potentially a problem. Because how do you make a satire about something that is so awful, and so overwhelming, and so apparent – like the mile-high tsunami that the comet is predicted to create – that it obliterates the medium in which the message is conveyed? Is it even possible to judge a film – and a comedy no less – by our expectations of what a film should or could be, when the point the film is making is so big and important that a critique of its machinations just feels small-minded and myopic? (Is it good? Is it bad? Who knows! It’s about climate change.)
Don’t Look Up is perfectly engaging, and of course it’s deeply admirable and commendable that McKay spends his energies making films that seek to wake us the fuck up. And though it feels churlish to say that the jokes don’t always land, the fact remains that… they don’t. Have we just seen Jonah Hill’s petulant man-child too many times? Or are Mark Rylance’s veneers and wig just too distracting? (There are still some wins: Blanchett and Perry, as the TV hosts Brie and Jack, deliver their lines with a demonic breeziness that is quite delicious.) Is it just that the principal subject is too depressing for us to crack a smile (though I confess I did when Chalamet’s Yule, with Gen-Z earnestness, asks Dr Mindy, “Can I be vulnerable in your car?”). And does McKay know this? That his task is impossible? Is he exploding the whole idea of comedy on purpose?
Or is it just that one of the jobs of satire is to expose as it criticises, and the sad fact is that there’s nothing in Don’t Look Up that we – or at least the “we” that’s likely to be excited to see an Adam McKay film – aren’t all too desperately aware of? Our leaders are morally bankrupt narcissists (Yes indeedy!). The news cycle has become a death spiral of meaninglessness and nothingness (It sure has!). Social media has stupefied us and stunted us in ways we cannot tear ourselves away from our phones for long enough to recognise (Sorry, were you talking to me?). Human beings are, for the most part, total idiots (🤡). Even as a film that tries its darnedest to tickle us out of our apathy, you know that Don’t Look Up, for all its noble and worthwhile intentions, is doomed to failure, and there’s nothing even remotely funny about that. Still, you can’t help but be grateful that McKay, like the crazed colonel, is willing to strap himself to the rocket and try.
Don’t Look Up is in cinemas from 10 December and on Netflix from 24 December
*They're gross, but he looks adorable, because he’s Timothée Chalamet and he’s adorable in everything! Hey, what’s that flaming fireball in the sky….
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
