WHOOPS APOCALYPSE (DON'T LOOK UP)

If Coronavirus did anything, it exposed the bluffers in power.

While all governments struggled with a pandemic that unexpectedly swept the globe, those who initially coped best valued expertise and listened to their scientists.

Those who tried to wish facts away and project an image of total control floundered.

It's hard not to think about Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and their mishandling of the COVID health crisis when watching Adam McKay's latest satire 'Don't Look Up'.

But the story is equally applicable to the climate crisis.

In McKay's film, however, it's not a pandemic threatening the world or a superstorm but a comet between five and ten kilometres wide which could destroy everything on the planet.

The comet is discovered by Jennifer Lawrence's Michigan State PhD student Kate Diabasky.

Her professor, Leonardo DiCaprio's Dr Randall Mindy calculates the trajectory of the comet and is so alarmed he contacts Rob Morgan's Dr Teddy Oglethorpe of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (a real division within NASA).

Together they go to the White House to brief Meryl Streep's populist President Janie Orlean and her odious son, Jonah Hill's Jason who is her chief of staff.

Waiting to meet the President in the Oval Office, they are introduced to Paul Guilfoyle's General Themes who Kate is appalled to later discover has charged them for food they can get for free in the White House.

The briefing goes terribly, with the chief of staff snobbishly dismissing their research because they come from Michigan State University.

Worse still, the President dodges any decision, preferring to "sit and assess" the situation because she is three weeks away from the midterm Congressional elections.

Encouraged by Oglethorpe, Kate and Randall decide to go to the media and warn the public of the imminent threat and risk being accused of revealing state secrets.

This leads to them going on 'The Daily Rip' - a hit nationwide breakfast TV show that adores celebrity stories and tries to lighten up the heaviest of news stories.

Fronted by Cate Blanchett's Brie Evantee and Tyler Perry's Jack Bremner, Randall and Kate find themselves going on after a mind numbingly shallow item featuring Ariana Grande's pop princess Riley Bina about her split with her boyfriend, Scott Mescudi's DJ Chello.

The interview with the two astronomers goes disastrously, with the hosts trying to gloss over the catastrophic news and Kate eventually screaming "We're all going to die" in a desperate attempt to grab the viewers' attention.

When it becomes patently clear that the comet presents a clear and present danger to humankind, President Orlean appoints Randall as her chief scientific adviser in a space mission led by Ron Perlman's Benedict Drask, while Kate is still vilified for being shrill.

But with Mark Rylance's tech billionaire also lurking, will the President remained focused on what needs to be done to save the planet?

It's not that hard to work out who the writer director is taking pot shots at.

Orlean and her son are pure Donald Trump Senior and Junior - holding huge set piece events to announce policy and even bigger rallies for chanting, baseball cap wearing supporters. 

However McKay also takes aim at a media that would rather focus on celebrity trivia than engage with difficult, hard hitting news.

There's a Sean Hannity style right wing blowhard commentator too played by Michael Chiklis known as Dan Pawketty.

Mark Rylance is a clear pop at the Elon Musks, Jeff Bezos and Richard Bransons of this world who have flirted with space travel for commercial gain, showing off their bright, shiny toys in huge PR events.

Most of the jokes land, although some try a little too hard to milk their laughs - a special pop song by Riley Bina and DJ Chello urging people to take the threat from the comet seriously seems like an excuse for Grande to sing and it seems to go on forever.

While McKay's movie on Netflix is mostly a fun, high paced watch, it doesn't quite come up to the standard of his star studded, Oscar nominated 2015 film about the financial crisis 'The Big Short' or his 2018 Dick Cheney biopic 'Vice'.

Unlike both films, it doesn't break the fourth wall that much to make you think about the world we live in.

You also get a mixed bag when it comes to performances.

Most are good but a few performances grate.

DiCaprio and Lawrence make engaging leads - the former, in particular, enjoying the chance to cut loose in an out and out satire.

Morgan, Guilfoyle, Perry, Blanchett, Chikilis, Himesh Patel as Kate's shallow hipster journalist boyfriend and Melanie Lynskey as Randall's patient wife are all good value.

Streep is what you expect - hitting all the right notes and relishing a few moments of slapstick.

Timothee Chalamet, however, kind of sleepwalks through his scenes in the kind of slacker role that would have been tailor made for Keanu Reeves in his younger days.

It's not that he struggles. It's just that he is saddled with a part that feels barely sketched out and he doesn't do much with it.

Grande's performance smacks of having your cake and eating it.

Here we have a pop princess looking for credibility, sending up being a pop princess by behaving like a pop princess. It's hardly a stretch.

Perlman kind of appears in the film but really doesn't get much of an opportunity to shine.

The same is true for Mescudi.

If there are standout performances, though, they have to be Jonah Hill's and Mark Rylance's who steal the show.

Hill gets to deliver some of the funniest lines in the movie and does a great job as a Don Jr cheerleader for the President.

In one scene, he condescends his mum's supporters at a rally Don Jr style by telling them that the working class need the super wealthy to take on "them" - the liberals, the intellectuals, the experts.

Rylance turns in a delightfully eccentric performance as an Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs style billionaire.

His character Peter Isherwell does glossy Apple style product launches about how they are transforming the world for the better but which are really aimed at squeezing cash out of a gullible public.

Isherwell has all the money and the influence to throw at big projects but he also has an inflated sense of his own self-worth and the charisma of a gnat.

If you were to describe 'Don't Look Up,' you might describe it as a more brash and glossy 'Dr Strangelove' with shades of 'Network,' 'Mars Attacks!' and 'In the Loop'.

As a tentpole film for Netflix this Christmas, it's a very sound choice - offering laughs and plenty of celebrities sending up our world as you relax after a heavy meal and an even heavier year.

It does enough to make you think about the world we have become.

But is it simply preaching to the converted?

Will it really cut into the MAGA demographic and make them think about how they have been used?

Will it really convince them to value expertise?

I doubt it because even after the Capitol Hill insurrection and all the arrests that followed January 6, quite a lot of people are still invested in the Trump myth in spite of the clown show that was his Presidency.

Jennifer Lawrence and McKay's next collaboration will be an adaptation of journalist John Carreyrou's acclaimed non fiction biotech startup story 'Bad Blood'.

Hopefully that will be entertaining too but with a bit more heft.

('Don't Look Up' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on December 10, 2021 and made available for streaming on Netflix on December 24, 2021)

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