Don’t Look Up: A Political, Satire Based Film
Netflix
Don’t Look Up, a Netflix original comedy-disaster with cast that stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Timothee Chalamet.
January 21, 2022
The Netflix Original Movie, Don’t Look Up, has everyone talking this new year. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, Don’t Look Up, is about a Michigan State Astronomy professor and his student who studies explosive stars, discovering the biggest threat humanity can face.
Ranked as 55% on Rotten Tomatoes, 49% on Metacritic, and a 7.3 on IMDb, the movie hit theaters on Dec. 5, 2021, where it made a total of $700,000 in its opening weekend. With such an admired cast, these numbers are low. Not even cutting a million in the opening weekend was a shock.
However, when the movie was then released onto Netflix, on Christmas Eve, the movie made $442.2 million in the Global Box Office by Dec.31.
Don’t Look Up, captures modern-day environmental and political issues, using comedy and satire. So what is the political hidden meaning behind this Netflix comedy?
The film is a metaphor for the climate change issues we are having today, and how we choose to deal with these problems.
Director Adam McKay began making this film before the global pandemic hit in 2020. He wrote the story based on global warming and environmental ruin, and how today’s society chooses to do very little about it and sometimes even refuses to listen to experts and look at the science that backs it up. After the pandemic when people were continuing to ignore the science, McKay used Don’t Look Up, as a different impending disaster to demonstrate the ridiculous reaction of people refusing to believe the science.
To a great extent, this film relates to COVID-19, and how people, when the pandemic hit and still today, refuse to believe the doctors, and scientific research behind it and believe the virus is some kind of simulation.
Don’t Look Up also includes more of Hollywood’s favorites: Ariana Grande, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, enriching the content behind this movie. With this cast, the film was worth every second of the two hours and 25 minutes that it lasted.
The characters in this film were so well developed. Each character added significance to the movie. Actors playing different roles that we don’t normally see, like Ariana Grande playing a version of herself and Meryl Streep playing Madam President.
Improvised scenes also made it into the movie which includes the “Oval Office’’ scene with Leo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and Jonah Hill. They improvised the scene for two days.
The director of this movie definitely knew what he was doing. This was only one of the few scenes that were improvised and as a viewer, I would have never thought this was made up as the camera was rolling.
However, Leonardo DiCaprio started his career by doing improvised comedies, so the guy has a lot of experience.
After seven months of half of the American population trying to destroy and stop the meteor, time ran out and the meteor hit the planet and completely destroyed it one continent at a time. While some stood in shock, some ran, some even tried to shoot the flying burning star, others sat and ate their last meal with the people close to them as the world was ending. The ending was a lot for me. The entire movie was full of laughs and giggles, but the last 15 minutes of the movie created a feeling of panic and sympathy. The film represents a “realistic apocalyptic film” and creates a lot of curiosity about impending disasters and if something like this will happen in our lifetime.
