Adam McKay
Don't Look Up

This doesn’t work, at least not completely. Adam McKay takes the events of any Armageddon and sets them in today's American society, with its distortions, its obsessions, its contradictions. A world devoured by social media, opinions, and the whims of a highly fickle public, where everything is image, everything is an election campaign, everything is business. People are addicted to social media, dependent on smartphones that know your feelings almost before you do, and the crucial aspects of public debate - even matters of state - are all filtered through an increasingly morbid, instant, childish media communication.

Thus, Professor Randall Mindy (DiCaprio) is co-opted into the TV world not so much because he discovered that an asteroid will crash onto the Earth, but simply because he's good-looking and more measured (more domesticated) than his colleague, PhD student Kate Dibiasky (Lawrence), who first identified that malevolent celestial body. The Trumpian President of the USA (Meryl Streep) decides on a mission not because she understands the real danger (the future is blurred in this world so obsessed with the "here and now"): she launches the shuttles only because she's doing poorly in the polls and wants to boost her standing. Everything is image. But not even the cynical president could foresee the intervention of the social media guru, the ethereal Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), who - strengthened by his sponsorship in the party's election campaign - proposes launching drones to break up the beast and exploit its precious materials.

Two factions will emerge, amidst media feuds, political campaigns filled with concerts and events, social unrest, despair, and the loss of the concept of truth.

The film is amusing, filled with insights closely connected to today's society and with many dynamics that have become immense in this age of the pandemic. But, there's a catch.

The prophecy doesn’t fully work when it adheres so closely to reality. The oracle cannot be called such, because it describes something that is already in plain sight. Therefore, McKay's effort is not as enlightening as others because today, frankly, there is nothing easier than mocking deniers, the toxicity of social media, collective TV neurosis, the rampant gossip that rises to a matter of state. The perspective distance, which can be projected to a dystopian future (as in Black Mirror) or negatively reevaluate a nebulous past (as in McKay's previous films), is necessary to create that cognitive difference that makes a work of this type interesting, sometimes enlightening.

Moreover, the desire to make a great social fresco that encompasses all today's aberrations does not favor depth, resulting in many insights but never conveying an additional sense of meaning and reasoning. Similarly, the characters resolve into puppets or little more, with that plastified patina typical of streaming platform products. They don't have an authentic character in their being, they are stereotypes, simple masks.

For example, I think of Christian Bale’s character in The Big Short. Amidst subprime mortgages and credit default swaps, he played the drums to songs by Mastodon and Metallica. It took little to give more three-dimensionality to figures simply "instrumental" to the discourse. But here, the handling of themes and timing is not optimal as in the past, and in some ways, a predictability reigns that was not to be expected. There are funny episodes (fantastic Jonah Hill), but they are fleeting sparks in a structure that is poorer in energy than previous films.

In the end, Don't Look Up offers a reassuring indignation, which doesn't truly break through the screen to make us feel partly guilty and complicit in everything. It seems like the degenerations are always someone else's fault, particularly certain shadowy figures who plot for their purposes: politicians, tech giants, advertisers who categorize people based on social reactions. Foreign powers disarm themselves, the people protest but in an innocuous way, scientists abdicate their mission. A depressing scenario that doesn’t remotely contemplate individual responsibility, perhaps because it no longer believes in it.

A hearty (bitter) laugh at the follies of our world, a laugh filled with resentment, but incapable of going beyond mockery, the slavish representation of our few flaws and degenerations which, unfortunately, are already clear and evident to us. And this is not enough to defuse and resolve them.