When Mom, with slipper in hand, invited us to come to her promising that she wouldn’t do anything it was safe to assume that it wouldn’t. When Don’t look Up, a new film distributed by Netflix, directed and scripted by Adam McKay, tells us from the very first scenes that it will be a light product and not a cinematic miracle, we can trust that it will be so. Instead, no, we can’t even appreciate cinepanettoni anymore, even when they’re made for $75 million.
The blanket critique by the critics’ desk, with snail to precede the name, is not justified, or only partially so. Okay, the caricatures of easily recognizable characters (Trump, Musk/Jobs) are obvious, but this is a comedy. In popular comedies, the man who comes home to find his wife in bed with his lover doesn’t show great psychological depth, but more insanity, made ridiculous because it’s exaggerated, and so do the characters in the film.
Don’t Look Up is a comedy, the all-star game cast was not a policy that would have guaranteed us repayment for the two and a half hours of life lost on the couch in front of the MacBook.
Although the themes put forth by McKay may make you think so (environmental crisis, power of institutions, trust in technology and science), the film is not a committed film, the kind with languid actors, in which astrophysicists like Randall Mindy ( Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) would have been well made up, and not in the more likely plaid shirt that appears in the film. Don’t Look Up doesn’t aspire to eternal glory because it doesn’t put any of the actors in their own comfort zone, balancing scenes in which Meryl Streep (Madame President), Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande and Jonah Hill appear. 

The dialogues of Don’t Look Up are comic lines in the style of Saturday Night Live (for which, not by chance, Adam McKay was the author for six years at the beginning of his career), in which we see many of the absurd drifts towards which the media and the population have been pushing in recent years, in the USA and with more awkward results in Italy. Presidents and mayors with fan pages of “little girls” popping up everywhere, spokespersons who are good because they know how to wear a Birkin by Hermès (and save her from the apocalypse, thank goodness), sexy scientists (to be read under the heading “virologists”) who just need a “guest appearance” to find the right inclination of their gaze in favor of the camera.
Indirectly, Don’t Look Up also talks a lot about Italy, and the inability to listen to scientific opinions, (as clarified by DiCaprio himself during an interview), a current issue, of which we only understood that it was not making us laugh, confirming that we looked at the finger and not the moon.
The film, which I won’t watch twice anyway, therefore seemed deliberately messy to me, replicating that media and public debate confusion of wanting to talk about everything at the same time. In the first scene at the white house, a catastrophic comet, outrage over the cost of snacks, beauty, scientific authority, politics, and the prestige of universities are all talked about in a single dialogue, all postponing the decision with respect to the only real reason the protagonists were in that room.
The White House, or the studio of the talk show hosted by Cate Blanchett, are metaphors for the living rooms in which experts of dubious experience are given the floor; it almost seems as if we have turned off Netflix and turned on an Italian opinion TV show.
The characters are cut to big chunks, the plot lacks salt and balance, it is a parody of a world that is already self-parodying. Wasn’t it clear enough that the sign outside read, “trattoria with working-class menu” and not “two-Michelin-starred bistro”? Luckily we have a plan to deflect the comet, which we will affectionately call Omicron, meanwhile we don’t look up, we could take our eyes off the finger and see the moon.