This movie is of course a parable. In Adam McKay’s Do Not Look Up, the Oscar winner for “The Money Machine,” the words “climate crisis” are never said, but he certainly means them. Instead, the film is about a giant meteor, and two astronomers who discover that it is about to fall from the sky and destroy the earth – but no one is willing to listen to them. The script was written before the Corona, and production, which was scheduled to begin in April 2020, was postponed to November due to the plague and closures.
At this time the team has discovered that whenever someone on TV prefers to ignore what doctors and scientists say and prefers to make a political spin into reality, it starts to sound like pages from the script they are supposed to start filming. So “Do not look up” is also a parable about the corona, which foretold its coming.
And maybe it’s just a movie about a huge rock on its way to Earth, about the president who will prioritize the treatment of the battle disaster – only if it helps her in the polls, about media that will never bother to talk about the catastrophe approaching, about the businessman who actually thinks Significant for him and the people who will ignore the findings and who prefer to do their own research – and will not listen to the prediction of two scientists.
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Meryl Streep in “Do Not Look Up.” A perfect cartoon of President Donald Trump, including the incompetent son who wins a state job
(Photo: NETFLIX)
“Do Not Look Up” – the huge star-studded production of Netflix now being shown in theaters – is not the first film to turn the end of the world into a black joke. It’s hard to avoid Mike trying to create the ‘Doctor Strange Love’ of our generation. In 1964 Stanley Kubrick turned the Cold War and atomic tensions between the USSR and the US into an ingenious black comedy, with Peter Sellers in a triple role, portraying the madness in the White House situation room, which behaves more like a kindergarten, and the madness of American military officers , Which may bring the world to a nuclear holocaust.
In 1996, Tim Burton directed The Invasion of Mars with similar satirical intentions: how the centers of power and influence – especially politics and the media – cease to function as soon as there is an emergency that threatens the future of the entire planet. In these black comedies, in which everyone becomes a cartoon, the alarming reality is revealed that the control and supervision mechanisms that are supposed to protect the world are also, in the end, driven by petty personal interests, and not out of sincere concern for the welfare of citizens.
If this idea, about a comet galloping toward Earth with enormous destructive potential, sounds familiar, it is that in 1998 two films were released on exactly this subject. McKay’s new film looks at times like a comedic remake of “Fatal Injury,” which tells an almost identical story, but with abysmal seriousness.
Point to think about: The President of the United States in “Fatal Injury” was played by Morgan Freeman, ten years before America had a black president; In “Do Not Look Up,” Meryl Streep plays the president of the United States. Will the prophecy return here and the United States be president in ten years? And if so, will she be a sort of Trump-woman, as McKay suggests in his film: a selfish president, who appoints her unsuccessful son (Jonah Hill) as head of the White House staff, who cares about her donors and not her citizens, and urges her supporters to ignore scientists and just not look up ? Because if we do not see the comet galloping in our direction, it is simply not there.
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From the movie Armageddon
(Photo: AFP)
Along with “Fatal Damage,” Michael Bay’s “Armageddon” was released in 1998, in which the Earth was also under meteor threat. Alongside the “Invasion from Mars” was Roland Amarish’s “Third Day,” which also dealt with alien invasion. These were the 1990s, when cinema seemed to be trying to destroy the world, and especially its hallmarks: the Eiffel Tower was destroyed in the Armageddon, the Empire State Building collapsed in the Third Day, most of New York was destroyed in the Fatal Damage, Mount Rushmore passed A makeover in “Invasion from Mars,” and in all of them the White House was destroyed. These disaster films – sometimes seen as works that inspired the terrorists of the 9/11 attacks – sought classic Hollywood heroism, the cowboys who would sacrifice their lives to save the world, but all dealt with the pessimistic feeling that this world would not have much time left to survive.
At the time, no one saw these films as a metaphor for a climatic catastrophe, but as a kind of cynical postmodern sense of general despair and a sense of futility. This world has exhausted itself. The one who expressed this feeling in the most oppressive way was Lars von Trier in “Melancholy” (2011), in which a planet hits the Earth as a kind of mass suicide of a depressed world, or a world finale on a biblical scale, similar to When Worlds Collide “, The 1951 disaster film, which inspired quite a few of the films mentioned here.
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Compared to the disaster films of the 1990s, “Do Not Look Up” is a little wiser, because it presents the disaster as a non-reality event, if only the surveillance mechanisms were functioning. McKay, who worked in economics at The Money Machine and the White House at Vice President, became an expert at describing the corruption of powerhouses abandoning their shift. And maybe that’s why, unlike the destructive fantasies of the 1990s, his film manages to be funnier, but also much scarier.
Stars against meteors
Adam McKay’s comedy about the destruction of the planet is funny and very enjoyable. If she had not been dragged over two and a half hours, it would have only benefited her, and us too
Adam McKay has created a funny and fun movie – very much – on a subject that will not let you sleep after you leave the movie theater, and he has brought together the biggest movie stars in the world. But McKay’s strength is also revealed as his weakness. His ability to amass stars and budgets (thanks to Netflix and its deep pockets) makes Do Not Frustrate Up a monster that lasts almost two and a half hours. McKay, a graduate of the Saturday Night Live writing team, wrote a screenplay that is essentially a satirical sketch about the media and politics, which could be reduced to a five-minute sketch (or two sketches: one in the TV studio and one in the White House). Kubrick’s Doctor StrangeLab, McKay’s clear inspiration, lasted a perfect 94 minutes. The extra 51 minutes of “Do Not Look Up” diminish the film and do not increase it: they dilute the amount of jokes per minute, revealing quite a few scriptural weaknesses about the world that Kay is trying to create and destroy.
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Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio
(Photo: NETFLIX)
A significant reduction in the length of the film would have helped to catch the eye and could have made “Do Not Look Up” one of Hollywood’s great satires. In 145 minutes we get a fun and invested film, which reminds us that everything that adds detracts. But the scenes after the credits are funny.
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