What the world really needs is another review explaining why Don't Look Up sucks butt

A dark "comedy" (to use the term very loosely) about a band of plucky educated white liberals trying to save the world from an incoming comet and more importantly all the dumb rednecks surrounding them in America. I use "comedy" in quotation marks because there's a few jokes in it but really not any more than you'd have in a decent drama. What you're really in for is an emotional experience designed to reassure the intended audience that their beliefs are true and they're on the right side.

Hollywood has perhaps never gone this far up its own butt. our heroes come from the same background as everyone in Hollywood and share the same social norms and political beliefs. The villains are a female version of Trump and Elon Musk. While the movie is extremely heavy handed in making sure you know who they are, both characters are totally neutered, lacking the buffoonery that makes their real life counterparts repulsive to some and compelling to others. It turns out that when Trump is wrong about everything but doesn't act like a clown he's actually really boring. Musk's portrayal is even more bland as the last thing the writers could ever do is shame him for drug addiction and weird s*x stuff. The first duty of a Hollywood writer is to let people enjoy things, even at the expense of totally gutting their own movie. After all, they've already had our heroine smoke weed in the beginning in order to show us that she's one of the good guys.

The movie is incredibly dated to the point where it would be incomprehensible to anyone who didn't live through the few years between Trump's election and Covid breaking out. The main message against climate change deniers was already by then as this was not a major political issue in the Trump era. But it's an issue where the right wing was wrong and stupid in the past so the left will keep trying to refight that battle over and over again. But the pandemic casts an interesting light on our heroes' preachiness. Their basic message is that we should always listen to the experts and academia. I believe one of them when being interviewed on TV literally screams "Trust the science!" Having lived through a global catastrophe where we followed the strategy of "just listen to the science man on TV" we know where that leads. It ended up in chaos as the scientists were pressed to make decisions in fields they were completely unqualified in. As our scientific understanding of Covid changed they tried to keep up and change their instructions but this just led to confusion. It turns out that putting scientists in charge of everything makes about as much sense as Ayatollah Khomeini putting clerics in charge of everything. Hollywood isn't really interested in science except as a cudgel to beat its opponents with, the same way evangelical Christians use the bible.

Ultimately the villain isn't Trump or Musk or the comet. It's America. Every attempt to save the world is stymied by the American people, whether they're ignorant yokels following Trump, greedy working class people who hope Musk's plan offers them a better future, or just Americans in general. Just in case you think they're trying to make a point about human nature, they shoehorn in a couple unnecessary scenes to have China, Russia, and India band together to save the world (fricking LOL), only to be treacherously sabotaged by the Americans. These are not people who hate Trump because he's bad for democracy. These are people who hate Trump because they'd rather have Putin, Xi, and Modi running the world.

In the end our heroes pick up an evangelical Christian to join them, apparently to prove how open minded they are. But this really only shows just how narrow the range of people accepted by their culture is. You can be their token Christian but only if you give up all the parts of yourself that really matter. The "Christian" joins them because of his sexual interest in our quirky heroine, apparently really turned on by her awful haircut and nose ring. He never challenges anyone's beliefs and is really no different from them in any meaningful way. It's not a coincidence that this eunichized version of a Christian is played by Timothee Chalamet, the most effeminate twink in Hollywood. He's described in the script as a "evangelical shoplifting skater punk" and his hair was designed to make him look like a gay hillbilly. Jesus might accept you for who you are, but J-Law won't unless you look like a fairy.

Isn't he so cute and non-threatening?

The movie ends with our heroes sitting around the table for a family dinner as the world is destroyed. Given the content of the entire movie up until this point, it feels like a mockery of the American family. As the Satanic black mass ridicules the Catholic mass, this anti-American family dinner mirrors the forms of a real one. In the end Leonardo "R-sluro" DiCaprio observes that before the ignorant unwashed masses of America ruined everything, "We really did have everything, didn't we?" If you can say yes to that because you're a soulless upper middle class white who has never faced any hardships or aspired to do more than fit in with your peers then this is a movie for you. I wonder how many fans of this movie would actually be able to sit down with their own family and eat dinner.