Star power does not a wonderful movie make. While a film like "Red Notice" has become one of Netflix's most-watched films and had star power like The Rock, Gal Godot and Ryan Reynolds, it wasn't the presence of star power alone that made such a fun movie.
Conversely, the streaming service's "Don't Look Up," has much more star power with Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry, Meryl Streep, and more, but it's a mixed bag of a film that doesn't quite know what it wants to be. And as far as disaster movies about a space rock coming to destroy the Earth go, the '90s did it better.
The year was 1998. America was given, not one, but two movies about space rocks coming to destroy the planet. "Armageddon," which is Michael Bay's last good movie, and "Deep Impact," which is cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann's last overall movie (RIP).
Both of these films dueled at the box office that year, with "Armageddon" claiming more money and "Deep Impact" claiming slightly better reviews, at least if you look at Rotten Tomatoes.
So when another movie about a deadly space rock coming to Earth appeared on the horizon with so many big names attached to it, how could I not compare it to earlier counterparts?
"Don't Look Up" isn't a straight doomsday movie about an oncoming world killer. Though it certainly would have been a better movie if that was the case. Instead, mixed into "Don't Look Up" is a bunch of political commentary that's about as subtle as an Saturday Night Live skit during the 45th presidency. The only real difference is budget and star power.
DiCaprio and Lawrence play astronomers in Michigan who detect an oncoming comet several miles wide that'll kill all life on Earth. And they have roughly six months until it arrives. So far, so good.
And if the movie had just focused on DiCaprio and Lawrence, again, it would have been much better. Their performances are great, with Leo playing an astronomer named Dr. Randall Mindy plagued with anxiety to the point he suffers extreme panic attacks when under pressure and Lawrence playing his counterpart, Dr. Kate Dibiasky. Her character rightly screams at people who don't take the deadly comet seriously and ponders why society is the way it is during its final six months of existence. They're both wonderful.
They're joined by Rob Morgan as Dr. Clayton "Teddy" Oglethorpe, and together, the three go on a massive media tour to convince society this deadly comet is coming to kill them. That alone would be a great premise.
But "Don't Look Up" is burdened with this frustrating political commentary with Streep playing President Janie Orlean, a Trumpian stand-in who plays the political hits of 2015-2020. Hill stars as Jason Orlean, her son and an obvious stand-in for one of the 45th president's own children.
The running gag in "Don't Look Up" is, "Hey! America is really divided," as if stating the obvious makes for great humor. But it just winds up weighing everything down. If Director Adam McKay wanted to do a film with political commentary, he should have studied Jason Reitman's "Thank You For Smoking" instead of Barry Levinson's "Man of the Year."
Perhaps the most puzzling inclusion in this film is Mark Ryland, who plays a Steve Jobs knockoff named Peter Isherwell. And what's strange about his performance is he essentially took his character, James Halliday, from 2018's "Ready Player One" and played the exact same role here, just with more lines. It's a curious and superfluous choice in a film packed to the brim with stars.
That's not to say "Don't Look Up" is an awful movie. It just doesn't seem to know if it wants to be a political satire, a disaster movie, or maybe, strangely enough, a sentimental film with some kind of moral lesson on appreciating what you have in life. But it doesn't do any of these things well.
Compare all this confusion to a film like "Armageddon." It's not high art and is at times downright silly, from Bruce Willis shooting Ben Affleck for sleeping with his daughter to playing Evel Knievel with a space vehicle on a deadly asteroid. But Bay knew exactly what kind of film he wanted to make, a cheesy action thriller where a bunch of drillers go into space and save humanity from a killer space rock. Every detail in that movie fits with those themes and narratives.
Could you argue "Don't Look Up" took a more challenging road by trying to hit on multiple themes? Maybe. But it doesn't nail any of those particular themes. I'd argue the simple road "Armageddon" chose was more successfully traversed.
(I'll go ahead and let y'all know I'm also a little biased toward "Armageddon" because it stars Arkansas native Billy Bob Thornton as the leader of NASA).
Then you've got "Deep Impact," which tries to bring a little more seriousness to the topic of an asteroid destroying the planet. There's no roughnecks drilling in space. Instead the film offers up Morgan Freeman as the president of a nation trying to survive in the face of annihilation.
You see, '90s film fans have a favorite between these two movies (it's "Armageddon" for me), but I'm here to propose they're both better films than "Don't Look Up."
DiCaprio and Lawrence are both fantastic actors, and I wish the movie had solely focused on them trying to warn people about the meteor without all the SNL b-material swirling around the story and bloating it to two hours and 25 minutes.
The political jokes in "Don't Look Up" were so on the nose that they broke my schnoz.