Encouraged by our times, it seems satire still has a bright future ahead of it and is even seeing a startling rebound. Adam McKay, 53, one of the most enduring figures in the new American comedy that appeared in the dawn of the 2000s, delivers a biting new example with his latest feature film released by Netflix, which follows Vice (2019) and his critical biography of Dick Cheney.
Long-time partner behind the camera of comedian Will Ferrell, known for co-inventing some of the genre’s most aggressively silly characters (Featured presenter. The Legend of Ron Burgundy in 2004 or Very Bad Cops in 2010), McKay has been going it alone since The Big Short. The heist of the century (2015), and works with an offensive “yellow” laughter to attack the most grotesque features of the time, which sometimes exhausts even the laughter itself.
Don’t Look Up, Apocalyptic satire, marks in this sense a form of remarkable achievement, by its explosive humor, its dramatic scale and its argument willingly sluggish, but revealing. Two astronomical researchers from a modest Michigan university, Professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his doctoral student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), acquire the mathematical certainty that a colossal comet is heading straight for Earth and threatens to destroy it under six months.
Sent on the spot to the White House, they are confronted with a deaf administration, unable to take the measure of the disaster. In President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her son and chief of staff, the arrogant Jason (Jonah Hill), they find outrageously narcissistic demagogues, obsessed with the moral scandals that shake up their (Republican) party and the imminence mid-term elections – short-termist and basely political targets.
Never mind: the two researchers turn to the media and target public opinion. But here again, the message does not get through. Cast in the format of a sanitized talk show, drowned in the hubbub of social networks, subjected to unfair competition in the opinion market, the scientifically proven phenomenon is found underestimated, folklorized, derided, and above all is not followed by no effect, no awareness. Only a billionaire boss, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), inventor of a state-of-the-art smartphone encased in biosensors, finally seems to be setting his sights on the comet, but for shameful capital reasons.
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