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Don’t Look Up is a black comedy, but you won’t laugh when you think about it.
Don’t Look Up begins with two teachers and students Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovering a meteorite larger than the one that killed off the dinosaurs tens of millions of years ago is rushing towards Earth. Soil. After 6 months and 14 days, upon impact, this meteorite will cause a global extinction event. Randall and Kate try to convince the people and the government to trust and act together. But with a mostly useless White House, deeply divided society, hope to save the planet is slowly slipping out of hand.
Since the trailer was revealed, Don’t Look Up has shown that it is there to “comedy”. As a black comedy, and like other black comedies, Don’t Look Up is a distorted mirror of the real world, portraying our realities through lenses that hide the poignancy behind the scenes. laughter. It’s not hard to see a correlation between the movie and the real situation we live in. And if you’re American, it’s even more poignant.
The event that shakes the world today is without a doubt the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the globe since 2020. The world has experienced many terrible epidemics, but what makes Covid-19 a miracle The events of the century are the social-political-humanitarian issues it “unearths”—issues judged to be worse than the virus itself. Don’t Look Up is clearly inspired by that. Instead of Corona, the film hurls a meteorite at Earth as a way of directly satirizing today’s world: even if you punch them in the face with meteoric truth, they’re unlikely to notice. .
The irony is evident in the film, but the sense of humor is too cruel to laugh at. Don’t Look Up doesn’t need a “drawing cake” to create a fantasy reality. Everything in the movie couldn’t be closer to reality. When a destructive event emerges, people don’t care about it. On the contrary, they ask irrelevant questions, sow doubt, and become so “allergic” to the truth that they choose to care about frivolous and superficial things, just because the truth awaits them unpleasantly. .
Don’t Look Up presents a harsh reality view of people in the age of technology. Having access to a wealth of data should have made it easier for the truth to come to the public, but it backfired. The society in Don’t Look Up is too divided by fake news and suspicion to voluntarily consider aspects of the claims objectively, unaffected by personal political ideologies. The consequences of it are disastrous, both in movies and in real life.
Overall, the script of Don’t Look Up is quite simple, but completely unpredictable, or the ending is too obvious, only we can still hope it is a movie that follows the typical formula, or embracing human expectations here, and in real life, nature is more intelligent and “enlightened” to something, there’s a chance the movie has a happy ending, to ease the discomfort the movie has slowly spread into the audience. The answer couldn’t be darker. And it was the right decision. Don’t Look Up thus preserves its poignant irony to the end, while perfecting the message it’s aiming for.
Bringing together some of Hollywood’s best faces is a great thing for Don’t Look Up . Star power completely anchors the film with its straight-forward plot with a lack of humour. Quality acting is undisputed here, which also partly compensates for the film’s spreading pacing. Many times Don’t Look Up doesn’t make watching a movie pleasant, sometimes it makes viewers find its story too long and not very exciting. In those moments, faces like DiCaprio, Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchet… make everything so much better.
Although the premise of Don’t Look Up is very gloomy, there are still rare rays of light in it. Besides useless politicians, a tech billionaire hybrid between Elon Musk and Joe Biden, the media that pursues shocking values and those who believe in conspiracy theories instead of science, black comedy project director Adam McKay still highlights the only thing that matters in its darkest hour: the bond of people and family.
In short, Don’t Look Up doesn’t have much to complain about, nor is it really picky about viewers. And if you’re patient, you’ll still have a pretty good movie with a bit of cynical humor and brutal irony.
