Old Ain't Dead

Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up

Review: Don’t Look Up. Wait, do look up!

Don’t Look Up is a laugh-out-loud satire about real events that haven’t happened yet. It’s true but painfully so. It paints a portrait of a society gone mad and a world hurtling toward doom. In other words, it’s us right now.

Don’t Look Up is about a comet heading for Earth. But not really. It’s really about climate change and COVID and the 2016 election and Roe v. Wade and science and political corruption and media and greed. Written and directed by Adam McKay, the over-long movie is full of barbed jokes and hyper-real situations.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up
They need media training for sure

The scientists are Jennifer Lawrence as Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky, Leonardo DiCaprio as her professor Dr. Mindy, and Rob Morgan as Dr. Oglethorpe from NASA. Kate discovers the comet. These three scientists confirm it’s headed for Earth and big enough to destroy the planet. They raise the alarm.

Meryl Streep and Mark Rylance in Don't Look Up
Listen to the money and don’t worry about the people

The political hack who lies to the American people (and they believe it) is President Orlean, played by Meryl Streep. Jonah Hill plays her loyal, drugged up son. Mark Rylance plays the tech billionaire who really runs the country. They convince a good portion of the population that the comet can be mined and will provide jobs. Their slogan is “Don’t Look Up.”

Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, and Ariana Grande in Don't Look Up
Would this woman really bed a sweaty minor league scientist from Michigan?

Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry represent the media as talk show hosts. They want to interview celebrities (like Ariana Grande) and poke fun at the two nervous scientists who sound a warning about the end of the world.

In this film, the tragedy caused by not heeding the obvious scientific truth only takes 6 months to play out. That’s enough time for the movie to make many points about greed, capitalism, politics, science, human stupidity, and self-delusion. There’s a good laugh at the end for a final touch of poetic justice.

Overall, this film is begging us to wake up, look up, and act on reality instead of swallowing lies. There’s nothing subtle about it. It hits you right in the kisser with every point it makes. Can it cause a change in society? Can it make everyone look up and deal with the truth? I have my doubts.

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Virginia DeBolt

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3 responses to “Review: Don’t Look Up. Wait, do look up!”

  1. John Newell Avatar
    John Newell

    I’ve watched the movie and am living the life. I wrote KILL THE CORONAVIRUS. It’s a detailed instruction manual that explains how to prevent Covid-19, how to treat mild cases, how to convalesce and how the medical community is perpetuating it intentionally. How can I say such a thing? Wild animals are and have been dealing with Coronaviruses for millions of years. Wild animals in zoos are dying of it. The difference is in the immune systems. You cannot have a healthy immune system consuming the modern diet.

    That’s because the modern diet is mostly fake foods that no life form on earth evolved to consume. If you only eat what you evolved to eat, you are fine unless you have one of those famous underlying conditions from not consuming real foods all along and you have cardiovascular issues, diabetes or some other degenerative disease brought on by consuming dairy, grain, sugar and domesticated red meat.

    My book has been on amazon.com since June 6, 2020 and is the result of my 40 years of research. You would think it would be flying off the shelf so to speak. But no, it sells slowly because no one wants to know that the food they have lived on all of their lives is going to be responsible for their death by Covid-19.

    That isn’t to say that everyone dies of Covid-19. It takes the young, the elderly and the extremely fit for completely different reasons. Most reasonably healthy people can survive Covid-19 with varying degrees of damage or even no damage.

    Covid-19 is the market correction for earth’s human over-population plague. No species is immune from the extreme consequences of over-population. Covid-19 is one of those consequences, Climate Change/Global warning is another.

    I’ve been doing what Leonardo and Jennifer are doing in ‘Don’t Look Up’ since 1970 when I painted what I called then, THE POLLUTION MURAL. I now call it The Reign of the Third Horseman. That painting only exists in photographs now but if you see it,
    you cannot help but notice it looks like I was an eyewitness for 9/11 and painted it as the Twin Towers collapsed. One of the shots taken that day by a news photographer and my painting are a spooky match. I painted 9/11 two more times. In 1974 and 1978. No one paid any attention to any of it. There was no internet then and people just thought I was weird.

    In 2005 I started publishing about local and global land use issues on the internet and part of that was about the disappearance of all the insects and frogs. My windshield did not encounter a single bug that year and by then, the bug sponge and bug screen businesses were toast. FROGS ARE US is one of my posts from that era that still survives on the net.

    Some insects have made a comeback. The frogs and other amphibians have not. They are in decline and will continue so. This is a bigger deal than an asteroid that was not our fault in the first place. We caused everything that is killing life on earth right now.

    Personally, I think the movie is misnamed. It should have be called TOO STUPID TO LIVE.

    Reply
  2. Rebecca Avatar
    Rebecca

    I really loved this movie – after initially thinking I wouldn’t. I don’t enjoy Leonardo DiCaprio (usually) and for that reason, avoided this movie. And YET – when we watched it, I so enjoyed it. I felt the satire was spot-on and a real wake up call, holding a mirror to our culture. Others have said they felt it dragged, but I didn’t feel that way at all. Anyhow – thought this was really great!

    Reply
    1. Virginia DeBolt Avatar
      Virginia DeBolt

      Glad you liked it. It did feel a bit too long to me, but it had a lot of points to make.

      Reply

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