Netflix’s latest star-laden film is an emotional ride through the absurd

By Andrew Webster  Dec 7, 2021, 7:00pm EST

For a goofy satire about a comet destroying the planet, Don’t Look Up sure takes you on an emotional journey. The film — helmed by writer and director Adam McKay, best-known for movies like Step Brothers and Anchorman — starts out hilarious, with big-name stars trading one-liners amid an impending apocalypse. But over its lengthy runtime, it slowly morphs into something else. Laughs give way to anger, frustration, and ultimately a kind of desperate hope. It’s a trajectory that serves as an eerie mirror to the last two years of pandemic life — just don’t go in expecting lighthearted fun.

Don’t Look Up doesn’t waste any time getting going. It starts out with a pair of Michigan State astronomers, Randall (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate (Jennifer Lawrence), discovering a massive comet in the sky that’s somewhere between five and 10 kilometers wide. But the excitement of discovery quickly turns to dread, as the pair realize that it’s on a collision course with Earth, and it will cause an extinction-level event in around six months. They rush to the White House to inform the president, played by Meryl Streep, only to be left waiting for hours as she deals with a much more pressing dilemma involving nude models. What follows is a delightfully goofy exchange, where the president and her chief of staff (Jonah Hill) who is also her self-absorbed son, debate the political ramifications of revealing that everyone is about to die ahead of midterms. “The timing, it’s just atrocious,” the president tells them, while noting that she’ll have her own people — from an Ivy League school, of course — assess things.

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