One of the final movies set to premiere before 2021 concludes is Netflix’s Don’t Look Up, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in their first film appearances since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Dark Phoenix, respectively. The black comedy from Anchorman’s Adam McKay sees the actors playing low-level astronomers trying to warn the general public about a comet on a collision course with Earth. There’s a lot of anticipation surrounding Don’t Look Up, and now reviews for the movie have arrived.
So what do critics think about Don’t Look Up? To kick things off, Germain Lussier from Gizmodo was pleased with the Netflix movie, calling it “funny without being slapstick, dramatic without being melodramatic, and brutally honest about the state of the world.” But in Lussier’s mind, what truly made Don’t Look Up great was its “universal malleability” with its exploration of subject matter like climate change deniers and criticism of the media.
Don’t Look Up isn’t going to be a movie for everyone. It can be a little preachy, a little awkward, and a little on the nose. But those are mere blips on the radar compared to the big one in the center: that Adam McKay and his incredible cast have made a popcorn movie about climate change that will hopefully have an impact like the one the characters are warning everyone about.
Next, ScreenRant’s Mae Abdulbaki was also impressed with Don’t Look Up, commending both the story itself and the cast’s performances, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence’s costars including Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet and Ariana Grande, to name a few. Abdulbaki said that if The Big Short and Vice weren’t proof enough, Don’t Look Up sees Adam McKay “settling into the world of satire with great ease.”
Don’t Look Up is a deeply unsettling yet darkly humorous watch. It has just the right amount of comedy and zeal without losing sight of its message or the tension bubbling beneath the surface.
Chris Evangelista from Slashfilm was much more critical towards Don’t Look Up, giving it a 4 out of 10 score and describing the Adam McKay-helmed movie as being “a smug, shrill, obvious satire that has nothing to say other than ‘Humanity is screwed.’” Evangelista thought the the story ideas in the movie aren’t bad, but they could have been done more justice with a different satirist.
This is a hollow waste of time and talent; a comedy whose idea of humor is simply pointing a finger at something and chuckling obnoxiously. We, as a society, don't just deserve better leaders. We deserve better satire, too.
Finally, Empire’s Ian Freer stamped Don’t Look Up with 4 out of 5 stars. Freer felt Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence’s characters were “likable, if not especially complex” characters to follow along with in this insane story, and while he thought the movie might have had “too much going on, and not all of it works,” Adam McKay ultimately stuck the landing “beautifully.”
Don’t Look Up takes the pulse of contemporary life and finds it crazy, scary and, most of all, funny. It doesn’t all land but enough does to make it a sharp, bold, star-studded treat.
These are just some of the Don’t Look Up reviews that have been published, so you’re welcome to look around elsewhere on the interwebs to learn what other critics thought about the movie. We’ll have to wait and see how this movie ends up comparing to McKay’s prior, tonally-similar two movies, the aforementioned The Big Short and Vice, but either way, the filmmaker will be sticking around the streaming realm. It was announced today that Bad Blood, his movie with Jennifer Lawrence about Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, will be housed at Apple.
Don’t Look Up’s limited theatrical release begins this Friday, December 10, followed by its Netflix premiere on December 24. Our December 2021 Netflix guide is available for those curious what else the platform is delivering in this year’s final weeks.
