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Don’t Look Up: An Overrated Netflix Satire

Don't look up sobrevalorada sátira netflix emmanuel alejandro rondón

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The year 2022 has arrived and, as usual, the first days of January are the ideal time to reheat dinner leftovers, rest the hangover, answer pending messages from the night before and, why not, watch a movie with the family. If that’s your intention, a word of warning: Don’t Look Up — directed by Adam McKay and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence — is the worst thing you could choose.

Don’t Look Up trailer. (YouTube)

Without indulging in excessive spoilers — I was also told not to see it and, stubbornly, I did — the film is a satire about the discovery of a huge comet by astronomy student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). The impact of this “planet-killer” comet against Earth is imminent, with 99.7% certainty.

Both Dibiasky and Mindy try to warn the U.S. government and the world that the planet will be destroyed in just over six months, however, not everyone believes the apocalyptic scenario and Washington bureaucrats are more focused on taking political advantage than saving the planet.

From that mise-en-scène, McKay attempts to address different political and social issues that are in the spotlight in the United States. “The danger” of climate change is the most obvious message, but there is also a critique of right-wing populist movements, conservatives, big media, fake news, life in social networks, bureaucratic uselessness, the ambition of billionaire businessmen and a host of other issues that we read about every day, recurrently and tediously.

Don’t Look Up: una peli woke con la que no mereces iniciar el 2022
Don’t Look Up trailer screenshot.

The first problem with the film is that it covers too many issues without delving into anything, leaving a shallow and mediocre delivery. The script is vague and the director’s vision of the working class is stereotypical, which is normal considering the contempt that Hollywood and the global progressives have for the middle and lower middle class not interested in their postmodern postulates and ideas.

The film shows the common conservative American as a malleable and manipulable subject, incapable of recognizing a bad leader and of opening their eyes to see an evident reality: a comet falling on the Earth. A message loaded with prejudice from a group of privileged people who, surely, do not know that common Americans — those who sustain this country and watch its films — are busy solving urgent problems: alleviating inflation, circumventing insecurity and finding ways to prosper in an economic environment that is more hostile than it was a couple of years ago.

The film’s second problem is none other than a poor understanding of reality. This is evident when it tries to criticize the press, accusing it of not informing (actually alarming) the population and of selling out to the powerful of the moment. Let’s see, in the last two years the press did not stop counting cases, hospitalizations and deaths, talking about new “extremely dangerous” variants and an unprecedented climate crisis because of which we have to stop eating meat. What is McKay’s perception of the media? Because the reality is diametrically opposed to what he wants to portray.

Last, but not least, is the overbearing arrogance formulated with laughable naiveté. The screenwriters, directors and several of the actors are probably proud of their “criticism” against the system presented in the film, but the truth is that it is a film made by and for the system they claim to criticize with a very high budget ($75,000,000) and a stellar cast reduced to its minimum artistic expression.

A typical film designed for a part of the progressive-woke public to rejoice in their non-existent moral and intellectual superiority. A proposal that only points out truisms that the hegemonic class itself wants you to see. The antithesis of the term anti-system.

The truth is that if you don’t want to waste two and a half hours of an overbearing, superficial and excessively boring attempt at satire, definitely don’t watch Don’t Look Up, look for something else to watch! You don’t want this movie to be the first movie of 2022.

Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón is a journalist at El American specializing in the areas of American politics and media analysis // Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón es periodista de El American especializado en las áreas de política americana y análisis de medios de comunicación.

Contacto: [email protected]

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