Adam McKay--and his movies by extension--are tough guys. He is the type of director who believes a heavy and preachy hand gets the job done. But for such a leftist progressive movie like "Don't Look Up" this is pretty conservative, not to mention ironic.
Don't get me wrong, the targets for his film's ruthless coldness totally deserve it. Take 2018's "Vice", in which Iraq War architect Dick Cheney is undramatically stricken with a heart attack now and then; or his best movie yet, "The Big Short" which is only that good because he has no shortage of targets: big banks, big businesses and even us who were not careful enough to think twice before how we go about buying a house or even investing in real estate.
In "Don't Look Up" the target is ignorance itself. Whether that is represented through media, pop superstars or absurdist conspiracy theorists it doesn't matter. What matters is the strange way in which he deals with right and wrong. Half of the characters--like US President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her Chief of Staff son Jason (Jonah Hill), not to mention tech mogul Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) are so ridiculous that you'd think they came out of an Adam Sandler movie. I get this is McKay's way of pointing out ignorance but it just comes out as leftist propaganda.
This exaggerated antithetic approach gets its point across on the surface, but lacks insight. For McKay, the best way to express political and social ignorance is by making fools out of the culprits instead of deconstructing their arguments through clever writing or self-destruction. It is, indeed, very propagandistic.
In the end, "Don't Look Up" brutally scratches the entire surface of the rise of pseudo-science, misinformation and even absurdist shamanism that attempts to thwart science back into the Stone Ages and as a wake-up call I couldn't agree more with it. Yet its revolutionary stance does nothing to help the artform condemning this movie's praise to be reduced to a great example in social ignorance.
It's a central wake-up call from a social point of view, but nothing more than a glorified anti-misinformation campaign from an artistic point of view.
Don't get me wrong, the targets for his film's ruthless coldness totally deserve it. Take 2018's "Vice", in which Iraq War architect Dick Cheney is undramatically stricken with a heart attack now and then; or his best movie yet, "The Big Short" which is only that good because he has no shortage of targets: big banks, big businesses and even us who were not careful enough to think twice before how we go about buying a house or even investing in real estate.
In "Don't Look Up" the target is ignorance itself. Whether that is represented through media, pop superstars or absurdist conspiracy theorists it doesn't matter. What matters is the strange way in which he deals with right and wrong. Half of the characters--like US President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her Chief of Staff son Jason (Jonah Hill), not to mention tech mogul Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) are so ridiculous that you'd think they came out of an Adam Sandler movie. I get this is McKay's way of pointing out ignorance but it just comes out as leftist propaganda.
This exaggerated antithetic approach gets its point across on the surface, but lacks insight. For McKay, the best way to express political and social ignorance is by making fools out of the culprits instead of deconstructing their arguments through clever writing or self-destruction. It is, indeed, very propagandistic.
In the end, "Don't Look Up" brutally scratches the entire surface of the rise of pseudo-science, misinformation and even absurdist shamanism that attempts to thwart science back into the Stone Ages and as a wake-up call I couldn't agree more with it. Yet its revolutionary stance does nothing to help the artform condemning this movie's praise to be reduced to a great example in social ignorance.
It's a central wake-up call from a social point of view, but nothing more than a glorified anti-misinformation campaign from an artistic point of view.