Maybe they were being passive aggressive since they knew that they would not be travelling on it.
In that respect, it reminded me a bit of HBO’s ‘Avenue 5’, which had a similar theme of a world run by the world’s smartest idiots (or stupidest geniuses).
Also, I think the most unrealistic thing about the movie was that they would discover a comet worth trillions of dollars heading towards Earth and somehow fail to mine the shit out of that thing until it was the size of a Chihuahua’s head when it landed.
I’m not really sure why Don’t Look Up didn’t really work for me. I don’t think it’s because it “hit too close to home”. Plenty of good comedy addresses the current state of political affairs - Veep, Silicon Valley, The Big Short (also directed by McKay), Succession. I think you just have to be MORE clever when lampooning absurd situations. You can’t just have some character who is an obvious stand-in for some ridiculous political figure doing the same ridiculous stuff they do IRL and expect people to be like “ooo…clever.”
I think what maybe didn’t work for me was there wasn’t much of a story. Or maybe a better way to put it is there wasn’t anything to make me care about the story since the inevitable conclusion was the total destruction of everyone and everything. “End of the world” stories need to either end on some hopeful note for the survivors or some sort of final personal journey of acceptance for the main characters. Otherwise you’re just watching a bunch of people blow up. Don’t Look Up didn’t present the human race as particularly worth saving. And the final dinner at the end didn’t really feel “earned”. J Lo shows up with her new “boyfriend” she just met. DiCaprio’s character reconciles with his wife…because. Contrast that to similar films like Seeking a Friend for the End of the World or Melancholia. The end result is the same, but with a more satisfying conclusion. Steve Carell and Kiera Knightly spend their last remaining hours with each other in the first film and Kirsten Dunst manages to get her depression in check long enough to reconcile with her sister before a planet lands on them in the other film.
Note that Succession is also a McKay work. To me, it seems that McKay’s biggest successes (critically) have been based on factual source material (The Big Short, Vice). Whereas his fictional work is less critically successful (The Will Farrell chronicles - Anchorman, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights). If you view Don’t Look Up through the lens of McKay’s factual work, it’s a disappointment. Instead, if you ignore all of the Oscar winners involved, and view it through the lens of his fictional work - well, maybe (just maybe) it’s not so bad?
I haven’t read through the whole thread but this pretty much sums up what I was going to say. I disagree that it seems like an old script polished to play up Trumpian excess. The whole movie seemed like an excuse to rip on Trump’s administration. The only two funny bits were Dibiaski’s continuing preoccupation with the general who charged her for free snacks and the President getting eaten by the bronteroc.
Nah, since Veep, the whole portrayal of the White House has been flipped 180 from the solemn respectful “West Wing” to a grown-up circus. Sure, they riff on obvious Trump-ian garbage, but to me that’s more about using low hanging fruit to bash DC politics in general.
McKay’s take on who Meryl Streep’s POTUS character was based on:
What I wanted to do with Orlean, and what I talked to Meryl about, was I wanted her to be a kind of a stew of all the disastrous presidents we’ve had, because she’s much smarter than Donald Trump. She’s much more savvy. So she’s kind of a mixture — definitely of Donald Trump, in how narcissistic and self-serving and shortsighted she is, but there’s also plenty of Bill Clinton in there, as far as the double-talk and the polish. There’s plenty of George W. Bush, in the sense that she’s utterly underqualified for the job. There’s a little pinch of Obama, his kind of smooth celebrity thing. Plenty of Ronald Reagan, empty suit performative kind of stuff. So it’s a little bit of all of it. That’s why we put the picture of her hugging Clinton in [the movie].
He thinks that all the presidents have been disastrous???
I think I’m starting to understand where my problems with this movie come from.
Perhaps. The only part that rang true about Clinton and Obama was the administration’s snobbery about not trusting scientists from Michigan State until it was confirmed by scientists from more prestigious universities.
Clinton and the inappropriate relationships also rang true.
That was kind of the point.
Because the world was ending.
If there’s any redemption in the film, it’s that in the end the little dinner group were able to be together (thus confounding the prediction that Dr Mindy would “die alone”) and to accept their fate with as much dignity as one might muster under the circumstances (as opposed to the utterly stupid death of Meryl Streep’s character).
No I get it. But it just comes across as one more disjointed scene lifted out of some other “end of the world” movie in a series of scenes lifted out of other “end of the world” movies that collectively produce a tonally inconsistent film. For example, it’s a very heartfelt scene that takes a few minutes before after-credits scenes of a naked Meryl Streep having her face eaten by a Brontorac on an alien planet millennia into the future and Jonah Hill pulling himself from the rubble doing his “douchey Jonah Hill character” schtick “Yo! I’m the last man on Earth y’all! Don’t forget to like and subscribe!” Those scenes feel like they could take place in three separate movies.
But the question remains, why should I, as a viewer, give a crap about these people and their last supper? At least enough to sit through 2 hours to get there? I’m not sure I do.
(correction. J Law. Not J Lo).
Also McKay’s take on who Meryl Streep’s POTUS character was based on sounds more like what Selena Myer from Veep was based on. The characters in Veep are much more ambiguous in terms of what party they belong to. The show is funnier because that ambiguity allows it to play as satire on the entire Washington political culture of cynical, over-educated, inept, elitists all acting in their own short-sighted interests and pandering to whatever constituents they are trying to curry favor from at the moment.
For me, this is exactly what worked. A need for narrative sense, a reliance on redemption, on consequences being earned, and a sense that reality always waits for the appropriate moment to deliver the exact right amount of pathos for the observer are the compelling yet unimaginative underpinnings of our storytelling.
Dependence on those structures can obfuscate reality. Narratives serve form rather than truth.
I’m not claiming that this film is 100% truth (nor is anything), but it was refreshing to watch a movie about human-caused catastrophe that isn’t also at the same time mostly about human perseverance.
I love Darmok and Jalad as much as the next Tamarian, but sometimes it can be refreshing to strip away story and try to look at human behavior through a different lens, one in which we are all just reactive beings responding to things in whatever ways suit us in the moment.
What’s doubly hurt Don’t Look Up for me was seeing the Netflix special Death to 2021; a satirical mockumentary / round up of the events of last year.
e.g. Tracey Ullman as Jeanine Pirro Madison Madison was particularly on point. (I can’t find a clip but here’s a pic).
I know the two movies are not trying to do the same thing, but the former could have done with a bit more of the latter’s special sauce.
I was drinking while watching, but… Weren’t they trying to blow up the comet so small pieces would land without killing too many people? That sounds realistic to me.
Force = mass * acceleration. The asteroid is traveling at a specific speed and will decelerate to 0 when it hits earth, so that part of the equation is set. The asteroid has a specific mass. Whether you hit that big mass into the planet all at once, or chop it up into a hundred pieces, or even vaporize it into powder - all that mass is still there, and will hit with the same force.
Now you COULD chop the asteroid up into a bunch of pieces far back along its trajectory and have them hit over a longer period of time, but in the movie they waited until the last possible moment to split up the asteroid, so that’s not what they were doing.
I wasn’t clear. “without killing too many people” was the part I thought was realistic.
Weren’t they going to pay off Chile to let a huge tidal wave hit them?
Also, that whole “worth trillions of dollars” bit bothered me. Obviously, if you suddenly discovered a mountain composed of gold, platinum, silver and other valuable metals, the market prices for those metals would crash.
A company that makes smart phones out of those metals wants the prices to drop. More profit on each phone if the raw materials are cheaper.
Yeah, but wouldn’t the explosion change the trajectory of the individual pieces?