Don't Look Up Don't Look Up

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Netflix - Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student, and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) make an astounding discovery of a comet orbiting within the solar system.

The problem: it's on a direct collision course with Earth. The other problem? No one really seems to care. Turns out warning mankind about a planet-killer the size of Mount Everest is an inconvenient fact to navigate.

With the help of Dr. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), Kate and Randall embark on a media tour that takes them from the office of an indifferent President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her sycophantic son and Chief of Staff, Jason (Jonah Hill), to the airwaves of The Daily Rip, an upbeat morning show hosted by Brie (Cate Blanchett) and Jack (Tyler Perry).

With only six months until the comet makes impact, managing the 24-hour news cycle and gaining the attention of the social media obsessed public before it's too late proves shockingly comical -- what will it take to get the world to just look up?!

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A chain-smoking Meryl Streep is out to trump Donald Trump in Adam McKay's over-emphatic political satire Don't Look Up.

With blonde ringlets and a permanent sneer, Streep plays a US president who chooses not to take notice of news about the world's imminent destruction because she's afraid it will damage her election prospects.

The story begins at a provincial university where Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his star PhD student, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), are researching the workings of the universe when they discover Earth is in the path of a comet large enough to put an end to human habitation.

Desperate to tell someone who can do something to avert this catastrophe, they set out on an odyssey that starts with NASA and moves on to the White House before putting them on a media merry-go-round culminating in trial by social media.

McKay is the kind of writer-director who likes to decorate his films with large casts and multiple elaborations on his central theme. His 2015 hit, The Big Short, was a bustling example of his style, using a line-up of celebrity cameos in asides designed to explain the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis.

With Don't Look Up, the complexities are easier to unpack, but the film is just as busy and similarly crowded with big names. Cate Blanchett, who is enjoying a run of roles as a sharp-tongued superwoman and/or femme fatale, is cast as Brie Evantee, a television personality who looks and sounds as if modelled on a Fox News presenter.

Mark Rylance does very well as a seriously weird tech magnate with his own plans for dealing with the asteroid, and Jonah Hill mumbles his way through his part as the president's obnoxious son who doubles as her chief of staff. McKay even finds room for Ariana Grande as a pop star whose problems with her rapper husband (Kid Cudi) somehow become embroiled in the two astronomers' misadventures with the media.

DiCaprio emerges from all this with the only performance to lay claim to any subtleties. Dr Mindy's rumpled appearance goes with a soft voice, a diffident manner and a tendency to panic attacks. To say the least, he's an unlikely media performer, but the unpredictable nature of public taste when moulded by breakfast television turns him into a star.

DiCaprio mines some gentle comedy out of this transformation, especially when Brie decides to seduce him and he's thrust into a Faustian pact. While his new popularity should make his apocalyptic message easier to sell, he finds himself softening his delivery for fear of losing his audience.

Lawrence, in contrast, is stuck on a single strident note. Unlike her professor, Kate finds moderation impossible. Her breakfast TV appearance drives her to the point of hysteria and has her swearing at everybody. In no time at all, she becomes a social media pariah and eventually finds herself in league with a band of like-minded rebels led by Timothee Chalamet. It's a wasted opportunity. Having snared an actor who can do just about anything, McKay leaves her stranded in a role where she can't use her comic flair .

Streep, too, has trouble arriving at a rhythm for her performance, maybe because Trump is such a hard act to follow. How do you parody somebody who has already gone to grotesque extremes in ignoring the dictates of reason and common sense? His vanity, too, is beyond exaggeration, so it's no surprise that Streep fails to come up with anything more than a set of mannerisms.

None of this makes McKay's scenario wholly implausible. Given the fact that the world's governments are still dithering over the increasingly dire information about the effects of global warming, you can imagine that news of a more urgent apocalypse could get lost in translation.

Yet the black comic aspects of this gloomy paradox are never fully realised. I kept wishing that it had fallen into the hands of Armando Iannucci (The Death of Stalin, Veep), a social satirist with all the gifts to make it work.

Don't Look Up is in cinemas now and is released on Netflix on Friday.

In cinemas, (M) 145 minutes Reviewed by SANDRA HALL
This article is from the December 23 issue of The Age Digital Edition. To subscribe, visit "https://www.theage.com.au".

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