I could be clever and end it at ‘Don’t’ and feel smug at the wordplay. That said, the word ‘don’t’ does kind of signify my advice to those considering giving their custom to the makers and distributors of this movie. But only kind of. I’ll explain below.
Anyway, enough wisecracking. On with the review.
I had not seen the trailers, nor read anything about its casting/making/gossip, nor read any reviews, nor stumbled into any spoilers, nor known absolutely anything about this movie before I watched it. This is how I like to watch all my movies and read all my books. It isn’t always possible, but in the case of ‘Don’t Look Up’ and the previous one I saw (and reviewed), ‘Spiderman – No Way Home’, I could manage to stay off all information about any of them, even while being active online. For that, I deserve not a medal, but the pain of the excruciating 2h25m of my life wasted in wondering what actors of the calibre of DiCaprio or Streep or indeed even Lawrence are doing in this story so confusingly told that I didn’t even get it was a spoof till about 40 minutes into it. Till that point, I just thought it was hamming of the worst kind from the stellar cast they had assembled. In effect, I spent the first 25% of the movie totally disengaged with and flummoxed by the narrative. And that, I suspect, spoilt the rest of it for me in more ways than one.
Spoofs require the actors walk a very very thin line between over-the-top acting and bad acting. They have to act in a way that looks like bad acting, but just about. It should not be so convincingly bad that the audience actually begins to wonder if the performer is not, well, performing well. Take, Tropic Thunder, for example. Every actor in it is over-the-top, every scene is clearly a commentary on a topical issue, every action scene is meant to convey a situation that is funny and overdone, but just about and no more. As I said, it is a fine line. Take the eternal favourite, Hot Shots or the recent Deadpool. These are films that have actors overacting but in a way that is transparently overdone, but still leaves a feeling at the back of your head whether it could be true. Borat is the finest example I can think of. With all the over-the-topness of the film, at no point does it seem as if Sasha Baron Cohen is acting-acting, if you know what I mean. He is dead serious. And it seems only the audience is in on the joke, nor the performer, who is sincere in their effort to live out (not act out, but live out) the situation on the screen in full earnest, without secretly laughing at the joke themselves. Even Deadpool, except for the moments where he breaks the fourth wall, seems like a real character who acts in real life like the way he acts in the movie. Indeed, let me give you a more recent example: J K Simmons as J Jonah Jameson of the Daily Bugle in ‘Spiderman – No Way Home’ spoofs the conspiracy-spewing radio host, Alex Jones brilliantly, something the actors and makers of ‘Don’t Look Up’ could have learnt from.
In ‘Don’t Look Up’ though, the shock and alarm at the imminent Earth-shaking danger seem too obviously overcooked and overplayed. DiCaprio and Lawrence are needlessly and aggressively distraught and hysterical in a weird sort of way, where the lay observer (me, watching the film) thinks they are hamming it up, because obviously, no scientist would react in this fashion. In a way, one tends to see them as actors trying to play scientists. That is not a good sign for a storyteller. Also, the characters of Streep and Hill seem to believe they are in a play requiring exaggerated expressions and hand movements rather than acting in a film with HD cameras that can capture nuance and the smallest of expressions. The whole movie seems like a vaudeville production, meant to reach the last seats on the uppermost stands, with bright costumes, dazzling lights, deafening dialogues, loud makeup, and hyperbolised actions just so no one misses what they are trying to say. There is simply no point at which the audience is credited with any intelligence to fill in between the lines.
OK, if the first 25% of the film was that bad, what about the rest of it? Now, there is a problem, you see. Because, if you are willing to ignore the first 40-odd minutes, it kind of grows on you. Why? Because it announces itself as a spoof by creating so many impractical situations that one has to pause and rethink what one started off expecting from the film at the beginning. Once you realise it is just a fun ride and it is poking fun at modern life, technology, tech billionaires with space ambitions, stupid Presidents, nepotistic political appointments, the left, the right, the hashtags, the sound byte, the pop star, the celebrity TV hosts, Hollywood, USA, India, Russia, China, UN, and everyone from Trump to Gore, it is easier to enjoy it.
Does that change my original advice: Don’t? Nopes.
So, apart from the start, where does it fail? It fails to change your mind about anything. You exit wondering whether it was about Covid, or climate change, or was it about some hypothetical comet after all? Was it a comedy? Satire? Spoof? What was the token black man doing in it? How did Lawrence’s skater boyfriend advance the storyline? How did the story move from ‘There is no danger’ to ‘Let us destroy the danger’ to ‘Let us mine it for riches’ to ‘There is no danger’. How do the first three lead to the fourth? This is important since the premise of the story, indeed the name of the movie, is derived from the fourth.
In conclusion, this was a very confusing movie, not just to the audience, but to the makers themselves, and to the hapless actors caught in it, all of whom are such accomplished veterans that it is, at times, embarrassing and more than plain awkward watching them allow the director to dictate their craft to them, ending up making a total hash of it.
In that sense, I’d say it is a true disaster film. In every sense of that word.
