![]() ![]() We’ve seen this movie before.” The upsetting thrill of the film comes from watching humanity face a fictional cataclysm à la Armageddon or Deep Impact and then, unlike the heroes of those stories, fail to rise to the challenge. Similarly, McKay said of Don’t Look Up, “the comet idea is perfect because we, as filmgoers, know the routine. When McKay worked at Saturday Night Live, he loved writing job-interview sketches-for example, a centaur applies for a job at a hospital-because the basic premise was familiar to viewers, no matter how strange or creative the execution. McKay’s most ridiculous, high-concept comedy since Anchorman 2, it’s driven by special effects and a star-studded cast that includes Meryl Streep as the president, Jonah Hill as her sycophantic son, and Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as simpering talk-show hosts. The satire of Don’t Look Up is anguished and clear to the point of feeling bludgeoning. “The goal was to take you through the amusement-park ride and have the last stop just be whatever-a landfill.” McKay’s early comedies married dark outlooks on life with crowd-pleasing silliness his more recent works retain the broad appeal while striving to deliver a message. “You’re going to be laughing you’re going to see shocking, absurd changes and then I wanted … for all of that to melt away, to end ‘real,’” he said. It’s a primal scream of a film, somehow even more direct than McKay’s last two pieces of Hollywood agit-prop, but he told me in a Zoom interview that he was intent on keeping the film entertaining, at least until its quieter, bleaker final act. McKay’s script has its knives out for the news’s unwillingness to tell hard truths, social media’s endless conveyor belt of distractions, and a political class more intent on winning elections than pursuing real solutions. Their efforts to warn society are met with derision, disinterest, political cowardice, and, eventually, total denial. In Don’t Look Up, which is now in theaters and lands on Netflix this Friday, a planet-killing comet is spotted in space by an astronomy student, Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence), and her professor, Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). “I was like, I have to do something about the climate.” The initial idea came from the political commentator and former Bernie Sanders speechwriter David Sirota, who said to him “something to the effect of, ‘The comet’s gonna hit and no one cares.’ It was very offhand, and that idea just kept coming back and bugging me.” “I kept getting this itchy feeling that there was just a giant shadow over all these stories,” McKay told me. ![]() ![]() Once Saturday Night Live’s head writer, he had gained attention as the director of anarchic Will Ferrell comedies such as Anchorman and Step Brothers before receiving Best Picture nominations for darker satires about the Great Recession ( The Big Short) and the vice presidency of Dick Cheney ( Vice). Adam McKay conceived of Don’t Look Up as a warning. ![]()
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