Don't Look Up's Politics Aren't the Problem
Political art should not come at the expense of art.
It’s nearly June, and I’ve only now started going through the biggest movies of 2021 that I missed. Is that bad of me? I was excited for two movies released last year; Evangelion 3.0+1.0 and Dune. The former I saw as soon as it was released on Amazon Prime in August, but the latter I didn’t see until this April – almost half a year after its release. Point is that I haven’t been diligent in keeping up with last year’s cinema, and I’m not doing better for this year’s slate of movies, though I will watch The Northman as soon as it doesn’t cost $25 to rent and Everything Everywhere All At Once when that gets a digital release.
Anyways, I just watched Don’t Look Up, which was, per Letterboxd’s stats, the third most “popular” movie of the year and the most “popular” movie of 2021 I was yet to see, if you define popularity by sheer number of users who listed that they watched the movie. Despite over 834,000 Letterboxd users having catalogued the movie however, it’s not exactly beloved. It has an average score of 3.1 out of 5 and many of the most popular reviews are mixed or outright negative. And remember that this movie was nominated for Best Picture this year.
Having now seen the film, it’s hard not to feel similar to the mixed sentiments of Letterboxd users at-large. Don’t get me wrong, if it wasn’t for the last two years of living through a global pandemic where politicians across the Western world have responded with everything from apathy, to active antipathy and arrogance, to outright denial, it’s hard to not arrive at a similar conclusion to Don’t Look Up; that the powers that be are greedy and feckless to the endangerment of everyone else amidst a crisis. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I’d likely feel outright negatively about the movie for being “unrealistic.” All art is political, but this movie wears its politics on its sleeves. Though as I just did, you can apply the conclusions of the movie to crisis leadership as a whole, it’s a very on-the-nose allegory for how the world (or perhaps America specifically) is reacting to climate change.
Herein lies the biggest issue with the film, however; the overt politics of the movie make it tonally glib. In a movie that is, according to Wikipedia, a comedy, I chuckled once. Hell, given how commonly people reviewers say that Don’t Look Up is a “depressing” movie that they only wanted to see once, if at all, I didn’t think of it going in as a comedy, nor did I think it was a comedy immediately afterwards. The thought literally did not occur to me. This is not admonishing the movie for being political; I agree with the film’s central message and I hope my repetition of the mantra of all art being political shows that I take no issue with any artistic medium having centrally political themes. Much like the difficulties protagonist Kate Dibiasky faces, Don’t Look Up carries a critical message about how humanity is approaching the climate crisis, but struggles at aptly communicating the crisis. Despite the film clocking in at 138 minutes, it neglects to satisfactorily develop most characters. As aforementioned, despite being a satirical comedy, virtually all of the humour was flat; the dialogue as a whole was very weak. And the editing was terrible – near the film’s climax, Teddy Oglethorpe discussed his love for store-bought pumpkin pie… with his mouth closed. Unless Rob Morgan is a master ventriloquist or if Netflix stops working at the exact same moment for me every time, this is a major editing issue, and that it passed any test screenings, let alone the supposedly professional editing team, is damning.
Of course, the movie has its defenders as well. Socialist union buster Nathan Robinson (am I ever writing about him a lot recently!) wrote an essay criticizing the movie’s critics for focusing on the movie being… a movie. He wrote that “Instead of discussing the issues the film raises, they [film critics] discuss whether the film is good or bad and whether it is successful in the way that it approaches the issues.” Of course, if any critic like Robinson chooses to focus on the themes of the film, rather than approaching the themes alongside the filmmaking, that is their choice to make. But I’m also a believer that explicitly political art should not lose focus of the fact that it is art, and outright neglecting to discuss the art of film (or any other medium) in favour of discussing the message only discourages artistic expression for the sake of art.
Compare it to Starship Troopers. Starship Troopers has different specific themes, focusing mainly on a science fiction interpretation of totalitarianism and jingoism, but like Don’t Look Up, it is an overtly political satire. The key difference between Don’t Look Up and Starship Troopers is that Starship Troopers is good; Don’t Look Up is not. Starship Troopers is funny and gripping, whereas Don’t Look Up has almost no laughs and is long and tiring, all while exuding David Sirota’s signature blend of smugness and the illusion of being cleverer than one actually is. Don’t Look Up fails because it forgets to be an interesting movie, with interesting and developed characters, settings, and scenes, all while being smug and condescending about its message.
Still, if Robinson and I can agree on one positive element of Don’t Look Up, the character of Peter Isherwell, portrayed by Mark Rylance, was excellent. Isherwell is supposed to be one of the richest men on earth, and as a top donor to the incumbent president, he wields a tremendous amount of political power. So much so that he inadvertently causes the extinction of humanity by convincing the president to not destroy the comet but to try to profit on it. Isherwell is an amalgamation of Elon Musk’s mineral mining and Steve Jobs’ fashion sense, resulting in him looking much like how David Byrne looks today, but more importantly, he’s almost senile and completely out of touch. It’s a strong portrayal of the gerontocratic make-up of the American political and financial elite, and he’s the only character who I found truly interesting.