Don't Look Up

The Academy Award nominations were announced on Tuesday and I have seen all of the nominees for Best Picture (click on the titles for my commentaries on Belfast, CODA, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, and West Side Story) except for one.  I am not really a fan of Adam McKay (I liked The Big Short well enough but I despised Vice) so I didn't watch Don't Look Up when it was first released but, since I have a tradition of watching all the nominees, I decided to watch it on Netflix last night.  Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, discovers a new comet but her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), determines that it is on a collision course with Earth and will cause mass extinction.  They contact Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), the head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA, who confirms their results and arranges for them to meet with President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep).  She and her son Jason (Jonah Hill), the Chief of Staff, don't want to release the information to the public because it will make her look bad right before the mid-term elections.  Dibiasky and Mindy then decide to publicize the news themselves on a popular morning show hosted by Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry) and Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) but Dibiasky's volatile outburst becomes a meme and the news about the imminent destruction of the Earth is overshadowed by the engagement of pop stars Riley Bina (Ariana Grande) and DJ Chello (Scott "Kid Cudi" Mescudi).  When President Orlean becomes embroiled in a sex scandal with her Supreme Court nominee, she decides to deflect attention by sending nuclear weapons into space to destroy the comet.  However, the CEO of the tech company BASH, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), believes that the comet contains trillions of dollars worth of resources so President Orlean decides to use untested BASH technology to break apart the comet and recover the pieces for the lucrative mining opportunities.  Will humanity survive?  This is a dark comedy that satirizes global warming along with political nepotism, celebrity culture, social media, abuse of power, and corporate greed but I found the message to be very heavy-handed (even though I agree with most of what McKay is saying) and the scope too large to be effective.  While there are some really funny elements (I especially loved the star-studded concert to save Earth and I laughed out loud at the mid-credits scene involving dinosaur-like creatures) and a few great performances (Hill and DiCaprio are my favorites), the uneven tone really bothered me.  The end of the world just isn't that funny, in my opinion, because the stakes are so high.  I found the juxtaposition between the touching dinner scene with Mindy, his wife (Melanie Lynskey), Oglethorpe, Dibiasky, and her boyfriend (Timothee Chalamet) and the amusing attempts by politicians and military personnel to flee the Earth in spaceships to be especially jarring.  I also found the stock images of nature interspersed with the comedy to be off-putting.  I didn't hate it as much as Vice but it is definitely my least favorite Best Picture nominee.