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‘Don’t Look Up’ Review: Tick, Tick, Kablooey

Adam McKay wants you to know that it’s the end of the world and you should absolutely, unequivocally not feel fine. (But do laugh.)

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By Manohla Dargis

Movies love to menace Earth. It’s human nature. In some of the most plausible doomsday flicks — “Meteor,” “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” — a big space rock threatens annihilation. Usually, if not always happily, someone finally comes to the rescue, though that isn’t the case in the 1951 film “ When Worlds Collide .” Before it makes good on its title, this shocker rockets survivalists on an ark to colonize another planet, which is more or less what Elon Musk has talked about with Space X.

The director Adam McKay is not in the mood for nihilistic flights of fancy. Our planet is too dear and its future too terrifying, as the accelerated pace of species extinction and global deforestation underscore. But humanity isn’t interested in saving Earth, never mind itself, as the recent Glasgow climate summit reminded us. We’re too numb, dumb, powerless and indifferent, too busy fighting trivial battles. So McKay has made “Don’t Look Up,” a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freak out about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.

Maybe bring hankies, though don’t look for speeches about climate change and global warming. Rather than directly confronting the existential horror of our environmental catastrophe, McKay has taken an allegorical approach in “Don’t Look Up” with a world-destroying comet. Oh sure, on its website, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (yes, it’s real) isn’t worried about near-Earth objects, as they’re called: “No known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years.” Whew. But no matter. The planet is on fire, and so is McKay, who’s embraced his inner Roland Emmerich (“2012”) with a fury by lobbing a great big joke at us.

That joke is definitely on us or soon will be in “Don’t Look Up,” which follows a studiously curated ragtag collection of scientists, politicians, military types, journalists and miscellaneous others who face — or don’t — the threat of a rapidly approaching comet. “I heard there’s an asteroid or a comet or something that you don’t like the looks of,” a visibly bored president of the United States (Meryl Streep) says to some anxious scientists who have been granted an imperial audience. The scientists really don’t like what they’ve seen but the president has other things on her mind, including upcoming elections and the friendly perv she’s trying to get placed on the Supreme Court.

Packed with big names, many locations and ambitiously staged set pieces (and a lot of giddily terrible hairdos), the movie is a busy, boisterous mixed bag, and whether you laugh or not you may still grit your teeth. The story opens in an observatory where Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a grad student, Kate Dibiasky, first spots the comet. Kate’s giddiness over her discovery soon turns to fear when her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (a terrific Leonardo DiCaprio), crunches some numbers and realizes the worst. Together, they pass along the bad news. Enter NASA (Rob Morgan), the military (Paul Guilfoyle) and the White House, which is where the movie’s breeziness takes a turn for the ominous.

Also for the frantic, strident and obvious. McKay’s touch here is considerably blunter and less productive than it has been in a while. In his two previous movies — “ The Big Short ” and “ Vice ” — he blended comedic and dramatic modes to fascinating effect. He experimented with tone and pitch, and played up and down different scales, from the deadly serious to the outrageously silly. It didn’t always work. It proved easier to get into McKay’s groove when you laughed at, say, Margot Robbie explaining subprime mortgages while she’s taking a bubble bath in “The Big Short” than when you watched Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney discussing another American war in “Vice.”

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Cast & crew
User reviews

Don't Look Up

Leonardo DiCaprio, Ron Perlman, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Jonah Hill, Rob Morgan, Jennifer Lawrence, Timothée Chalamet, Kid Cudi, and Ariana Grande in Don't Look Up (2021)

Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn humankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth. Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn humankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth. Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn humankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.

David Sirota
Leonardo DiCaprio
Jennifer Lawrence
Meryl Streep
4.7K User reviews
318 Critic reviews
49 Metascore
24 wins & 95 nominations total

Top cast 99+

Dr. Randall Mindy

Kate Dibiasky

President Orlean

Brie Evantee

Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe

Jason Orlean

Peter Isherwell

Jack Bremmer

Benedict Drask

(as Scott Mescudi)

Dan Pawketty

Adul Grelio

General Themes

Congressman Tenant
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Trivia The Chicxulub asteroid Kate Dibiasky mentions hit Earth 66 million years ago in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. The estimated size of the asteroid was 10 kilometers (six miles) wide and resulted in 75% of all life on the planet dying. Known as the dinosaur killer, the asteroid left a crater estimated to be 150 kilometers (93 miles) in diameter and 20 kilometers (12 miles) in depth.
Goofs Astronomers turn off all the lights and screens within the dome when they take images of the sky.

Kate Dibiasky : You guys, the truth is way more depressing. They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for.

Crazy credits There are mid-credits and post-credits scenes.
Connections Featured in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: Jennifer Lawrence/Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats (2021)
Soundtracks Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta F' wit Written by The GZA (as Gary Grice), Method Man (as Clifford Smith), Ol' Dirty Bastard (as Russell Jones), RZA (as Robert Diggs), Ghostface Killah (as Dennis Coles), Inspectah Deck (as Jason Hunter), Raekwon (as Corey Woods) and U-God (as Lamont Hawkins) Performed by Wu-Tang Clan Courtesy of RCA Records By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment

User reviews 4.7K

Sleepin_Dragon
Dec 23, 2021
How long is Don't Look Up? Powered by Alexa
What is the song Kate is singing to herself at the beginning of the movie?
December 24, 2021 (United States)
United States
Official Netflix
No miren arriba
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Hyperobject Industries
Province of British Columbia Production Services Tax Credit
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$75,000,000 (estimated)

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 18 minutes
Dolby Atmos
Dolby Digital

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Don't Look Up Reviews

The film suffers in that the human moments aren’t nearly human enough.

Full Review | Jul 18, 2024

["Don't Look Up"] accurately depicts how sensationalism today can stoke panic, fear, and mistrust among the public. Suddenly, science doesn’t matter as much anymore, when it contradicts one’s personal truths.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 4, 2024

I laughed, I laughed some more, and I nearly died at certain points… but through all the satirical material there is true heart to the entire film… as well tense themes that make us look at ourselves. DiCaprio is incredible

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Disaster film is a fitting title because this film was a disaster.

On par with a mediocre SNL sketch.

Don't Look Up hilariously approaches almost every theme worthy of discussion through Adam McKay's satirical screenplay that will undoubtedly leave viewers either incredibly satisfied or extremely triggered.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023

Don’t Look Up doesn’t give any space for the viewer to breathe. The film is chaotic and cluttered as only some characters are used to serve a narrative purpose.

Full Review | Jul 21, 2023

Incredibly effective, and it was nice to see the craziness of the world we’re living in portrayed as how it actually feels to live in it; often frustrating but usually ridiculous at how oblivious and indifferent most people are...

Full Review | Jul 19, 2023

Despite some clever gags... the film ultimately runs out of steam and fails to make a deep impact.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 12, 2022

How I learned to stop worrying and love Don’t Look Up? Adam McKay’s film is a savage American political satire and the best since Wag the Dog. In his own words, he timed that shit perfectly.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 21, 2022

Don’t Look Up calls out institutional indifference to impending disaster with relatable and riveting rage thanks to a scorching script and engaged ensemble.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

There’s so much crammed into this movie, and it’s a miracle that (for the most part) McKay manages to hold it all together.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 16, 2022

It's merely stating what everyone has already observed for the past two years, and delivering it with a shit-eating grin.

Full Review | Jul 8, 2022

A satire that at times reaches a revitalizing elegance and at others seems to emulate the level of discourse and debate in social media, television, and family tables: rough, raw, superficial, and even vulgar. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 28, 2022

Initially, the satire has a few funny moments... But I can't remember anything else. For this reason, I can't judge it fairly. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 8, 2022

Although I tend to agree with McKay’s worldview and identify with his cynicism about politics, media culture, and humanity’s general short-sightedness, his methods as a filmmaker rarely convince me. Don’t Look Up might be the exception.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 29, 2022

Like "The Big Short" and "Vice," McKay's latest film pulls no punches in his political commentary, as he continues to make some excellent points but in a primarily condescending manner to his viewers who already received the message long ago.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | May 18, 2022

The bulk of the movie is played for gags before the serious stuff kicks in at the end. Its never easy for a director to reconcile such contrasting tones, and McKay is no exception.

Full Review | Mar 29, 2022

Its still sadly rare to see female characters working in STEM given the grace to be imperfect on screen.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Mar 17, 2022

Don’t Look Up ultimately feels like just one more disaster movie: it is far easier—and maybe even more fun—to imagine the apocalyptic end of the world than to imagine how we could live in a radically different way now to prevent it.

Full Review | Mar 14, 2022

Don't Look Up Review

We’re all going to die..

Don't Look Up has a limited theatrical release starting on Dec. 10 and will debut on Netflix Dec. 24.

In the 1998 Michael Bay film Armageddon , scientists discovered a massive asteroid on a collision course with Earth and the United States used all its might and ingenuity to recruit a team of heroic misfits to save the world. But after decades of inaction on climate change, a man-made threat that actually has the potential to destroy the planet, and the United States’ disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the jingoistic idealism behind Armageddon now feels like an utter fantasy. Adam McKay updates the script in Don’t Look Up, a brutally dark comedy about how greed, politics, and misinformation will doom us all.

The absolutely star-studded film starts with classic apocalyptic science fiction beats as Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy PhD student at Michigan State, excitedly shares her discovery of a new comet with her endearingly awkward professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio). A teachable moment of calculating the comet’s trajectory turns alarming as they realize it’s going to collide with Earth in six months. After contacting NASA, they’re quickly whisked away to brief the president on their findings — and are absolutely appalled by her reaction.

The Best Director of a Movie in 2021

Making movies is a team effort, but we can all agree directors are a pretty important part of that equation. And 2021 was a real showcase for talented filmmakers who are at the top of their respective games.

President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) is a leader in the mold of Donald Trump, concerned far more with optics than reality. She and her smarmy son/chief-of-staff Jason Orlean (Jonah Hill) dismiss the science and promise to have people with Ivy League degrees look at it after the midterms. That surreal meeting is just the beginning of McKay’s takedown of the failings of all of America’s institutions, which at times barely feels like parody. McKay is no stranger to political films, having broken down the 2008 financial crisis in The Big Short and covered the career of Vice President Dick Cheney in Vice , and Don’t Look Up feels like a continuation of his work pointing out how we all suffer for the benefit of the few with wealth and power.

Dr. Mindy and Kate try to take their case to the press, but fail to gain enough traction with readers to continue the news cycle. Pleading her case on TV, Kate is branded as a hysterical Cassandra, though Mindy gets more time by charming talk show host Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett). The astronomers and their allies have to desperately fight to maintain the attention of a public more interested in celebrity breakups, a plot driven by Ariana Grande who does a spectacular job in this plot as the pop star Riley Bina, seamlessly transitioning from talking about saving the manatees with youthful enthusiasm to viciously dismissing Mindy and Kate as old and out of touch.

What is your favorite Adam McKay movie?

Things get even more dire when Orlean mega donor and tech billionaire Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) gets involved in the situation. While he doesn’t channel specific aspects of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, Rylance somehow manages to embody the qualities they all share in the unsettlingly soft spoken Peter, who is utterly confident in his own power, possibly because his wealth and influence protects him from ever seeing any consequences from his failings. He’s an avatar for out-of-control capitalism: the tech bros who would rather put their faith in unproven tactics like carbon scrubbing and dimming the sun than make any real sacrifice and the oil companies that lie about the impact of climate change even as they invest in the technology needed to capitalize on melting Arctic ice.

So many beats of the movie feel horrifyingly real, like the head of NASA being an anesthesiologist political appointee, or Kate’s parents dismissing her attempts to explain her findings by saying “We don’t want to talk politics.” Even with all of Don’t Look Up’s veers into absurdism, it’s almost too dark, asking if it’s enough to try even if you fail to actually make a difference.

It’s also overly long, drifting into tangents that just seem to wallow in nihilism while other times making all too abrupt shifts in the main plot. McKay also employs some distinctively jarring film techniques like fourth wall breaking supertext and having the camera zoom in on inanimate objects as if it’s grown bored with the conversation happening between the film’s immensely talented cast. McKay also splices in plenty of stock nature video, unnecessarily showing what’s at stake in a story that would be better off more centered on its characters.

A bleak commentary on humanity’s failure to address climate change, Don’t Look Up eviscerates disaster movie tropes and the institutions that fail to stand up for the greater good of humanity. While McKay makes some missteps with his direction and screenplay, it’s an overall strong outing driven by an incredible cast.

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Don’t Look Up Review

Don’t Look Up

If there were Oscars given for casting (sort it, Academy), Francine Maisler would be a shoo-in for the 2022 gong. For, as well as Dune and Being The Ricardos , Maisler has assembled debatably the most stacked cast of the year for Don’t Look Up . Actors identifiable by first names only: Leo ; Meryl ; Cate ; Jonah ; Timothée . The pulling power is both director Adam McKay ( The Big Short and Vice turned him into a thesp-magnate) and the premise. Don’t Look Up is essentially Deep Impact played for yuks, Armageddon if it had a brain. It might bite off more than it can chew, but it is frequently funny, highly ambitious brain-food. If you think this is a Leonardo DiCaprio environmental vanity project, then think again.

McKay uses the plot-core of two astronomers, Dr Randall Minty (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Dr Kate Dibiasky ( Jennifer Lawrence ), fast-tracked to the White House after discovering an extinction-level comet heading directly for Earth, as a means to satirise pretty much every aspect of modern life; from do-gooding billionaires to social-media break-ups, cheery breakfast-show banter to geo-politics. But McKay reserves his sharpest targeting for nepotistic Republican politicians in the shape of President Orlean (Streep, aces), a chain-smoking chief whose policy for the poor suggests they should pick “better lottery numbers”, and her Chief Of Staff and son Jason ( Jonah Hill , coming on perfectly like a Trump kid) who in the darkest moment says a prayer for “dope stuff”. In his political wheelhouse, McKay’s satire feels both too funny to be true and spot-on.

Lawrence and DiCaprio are likeable if not especially complex guides through the chaos.

Getting short shrift from the Oval Office, Randall and Kate go off script to bring the ‘Planet Killer’ to the world’s attention, meeting a gallery of rich characters in the process: a Musk-esque tech giant ( Mark Rylance ) who bought the Gutenberg Bible and lost it; relentlessly upbeat morning-show hosts ( Tyler Perry , Cate Blanchett); a pop star ( Ariana Grande ) who supports a manatee sanctuary and flip-flops on the does-the-comet-exist? debate; and a religious skater-boi (Timothée Chalamet), who sweetly provides Kate with some much-needed solace.

Lawrence and DiCaprio are likeable if not especially complex guides through the chaos, the former all Lisbeth Salander haircut and attitude, the latter a bag of nerves and ailments (although he gets a great Peter-Finch-In- Network meltdown). McKay’s direction sometimes moves at the clip of a disaster movie (the space shuttle launches are genuinely impressive) and at other times pauses for montages depicting life just carrying on in the face of impending destruction. It’s a film about very modern malaises: how we fail to take personal responsibility, be it in relationships or on the political stage; how expertise is constantly undermined; and how truth in news is moribund. There’s perhaps too much going on and not all of it works. Still, McKay sticks the ending beautifully, adding a killer sting that hopefully Netflix’s end-credits-interrupting technology won’t ruin — perhaps the only 21st-century evil Don’t Look Up doesn’t skewer.

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Leonardo dicaprio and jennifer lawrence in adam mckay’s ‘don’t look up’: film review.

An all-star cast that also includes Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep faces the end of the world in Netflix's satire of climate crisis and political opportunism.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio in 'Don't Look Up'

In 1998, Earth braced for dueling annihilation events as Deep Impact and Armageddon hit multiplexes two months apart. Twenty-three years later, Hollywood is again sending an extinction-level comet hurtling through space toward us in Don’t Look Up . Those earlier films opted for earnest melodrama and big, dumb yippee-ki-kay heroics, respectively. It’s probably only fitting that in 2021 we get the end-of-the-world movie we deserve — a cynical, insufferably smug satire stuffed to the gills with stars that purports to comment on political and media inattention to the climate crisis but really just trivializes it. Dr. Strangelove it ain’t.

The movie will have a limited theatrical run from Dec. 10, ahead of its Dec. 24 Netflix bow, and no doubt some will find its easy digs at the indifference of a shamelessly self-dealing White House administration, the greed of a monolithic tech company, the vapidity of upbeat morning television and the outsize influence of social media quite hilarious. I did not.

Full credits

Distributor: Netflix Production company: Hyperobject Industries Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Himesh Patel, Melanie Lynskey, Michael Chiklis, Tomer Sisley, Paul Guilfoyle, Robert Joy, Hettienne Park, Connor Sweeney, Robert Radochia Director: Adam McKay Screenwriter: Adam McKay; story by McKay, David Sirota Producers: Adam McKay, Kevin Messick Executive producer: Jeff Waxman Director of photography: Linus Sandgren Production designer: Clayton Hartley Costume designer: Susan Matheson Music: Nicholas Britell Editor: Hank Corwin Visual effects supervisor: Raymond Gieringer Casting: Francine Maisler

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Summary Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student, and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) make an astounding discovery of a comet orbiting within the solar system. The problem — it’s on a direct collision course with Earth. The other problem? No one really seems to care. Turns out warning mankind about a plane ... Read More

Directed By : Adam McKay

Written By : Adam McKay, David Sirota

Don't Look Up

Where to watch.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Dr. randall mindy, jennifer lawrence, kate dibiasky, meryl streep, president orlean, cate blanchett, brie evantee, dr. teddy oglethorpe, jason orlean, mark rylance, peter isherwell, tyler perry, jack bremmer, timothée chalamet, ron perlman, benedict drask, ariana grande, himesh patel, melanie lynskey, michael chiklis, dan pawketty, tomer sisley, adul grelio, paul guilfoyle, general themes, congressman tenant, jack alberts, critic reviews.

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Don't Look Up

Directed by: Adam McKay

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Timothée Chalamet

Rated R, 138 minutes

As the saying goes, comedy is tragedy plus time. But what if there isn’t any more time? “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s latest political satire, envisions a global catastrophe so perfectly final—a giant comet on a direct collision course with Earth—that the inhabitants of the planet lose the ability to take their doom seriously. Comedy may be tragedy plus time, but in a crunch, comedy prevails.

The comedy of “Don’t Look Up” is of a wisecracking, indelicate variety, often more angry than clever. Long removed from his early-career slapstick comedies like “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights,” McKay has settled into a more cantankerous phase of his career, a phase that reached its blustering apex with 2018’s “Vice,” the derisive and gimmicky biopic of Dick Cheney. “Don’t Look Up” thankfully finds the writer-director more focused (and more cutting with his barbs), though still flailing, following impulses in every direction.

The movie speeds along its tour of American cowardice, stitching together reactions (or the distressing lack thereof) to the approaching comet while the anxious Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Revenant”) and Ph . D candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”) try to convince humanity of the seriousness of the threat. McKay connects the scenes haphazardly, cutting them off midsentence and embellishing transitions with snippets of wildlife footage, lending his apocalypse tale an apt sense of urgency. But even urgency is insufficient, Randall and Kate discover, as the president ignores them and the press depicts them as lunatics. McKay’s view of the collective American response to disaster is a damning portrait of a nation too entrenched in its insignificant trifles to react to real and present dangers. The important failures have already happened; all that’s left is for the shoe to drop.

The whole thing is an unmistakable allegory for climate change. In that context, McKay’s frustrations—with politicians for stalling important action, with profiteers for making billions off catastrophe and then using the money to launder their reputations, with journalists and media personalities for covering only the topics that generate the most clicks, with all of us for taking a greater interest in the love lives of celebrities than in the salvation of our planet—are familiar to anyone who spends too much time doomscrolling on social media or who feels angry and helpless watching the news. But “Don’t Look Up” is satire, not self-help; McKay’s aim is to diagnose, not to cure.

As was the case with “Vice,” McKay’s broad evaluations—of the nation, of the species—are agreeable enough (honest scientist good, cynical politician bad), but superficial. With a crowded cast and a busy script, the final cut of “Don’t Look Up” is a parade of flat characters who pop up to demonstrate the various personality types McKay wishes to mock. Which, in fairness, is often the point; to nobody’s surprise, McKay has little admiration for Donald Trump and his ilk, so he gets out his lampoons at the former president’s expense in the character of President Orlean (Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady”), an odious commander-in-chief whose disregard for anybody other than her donors marches the human race several steps closer to destruction. Elsewhere, better-drawn characters demonstrate that McKay is clearly capable of writing beyond caricature, but for whatever reason often chooses not to. Among the film’s brightest spots are Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate, grim and irreverent in the wake of her discovery of the deadly comet, and Timothée Chalamet’s (“Dune”) long-haired Yule, the evangelical skater bro who shows up late in the film and quickly becomes Kate’s partner for the end of the world. “Can I be vulnerable in your car?” he asks Randall before proposing marriage to Kate.

At its best, “Don’t Look Up” trades in the global chaos for small surprises of tenderness, allowing its characters to truly grapple with the loss they all face. (“We really did have everything, didn’t we?” Randall muses wistfully toward the end.) It’s baffling, then, that McKay bypasses these moments so often in favor of cramming in a few more one-off gags, a few more cameos. His maximalist style is entertaining but too often toothless, setting up an existential crisis only to avoid it at all costs. Perhaps this is his final indictment of humanity, that we were too afraid to save ourselves. The sentiment, lost in the shuffle of subplots and planetary spectacle, is a shout in the wind.

Originally published in The Harvard Press on 1/14/22.

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Don't Look Up First Reviews: Armageddon With a Brain

Critics say adam mckay's latest satire is a bit heavy-handed and hits too close to home, but it succeeds on the strength of its reliable a-list cast and some genuinely funny gags..

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From Adam McKay , the Oscar-winning filmmaker who gave us Anchorman and The Big Short , comes an all-star ensemble disaster flick with a satirical bent. Don’t Look Up follows a pair of scientists (played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence ) who discover an enormous comet heading towards Earth but can’t convince enough of the planet to care.

According to the first reviews, the movie itself is a near miss, but a good enough hit in the laughs and casting departments, particularly when it comes to Meryl Streep as the President of the United States. Even many of the negative takes offer praises for the performances and much of McKay’s jokes, though everyone agrees the situation of the comedy is too familiar right now.

Here’s what critics are saying about Don’t Look Up :

Is Don’t Look Up essential viewing?

This is the star-studded, scabrous, scathing political and social satire the world needs right now . – James Croot, stuff.co.nz

A popcorn movie about climate change that will hopefully have an impact like the one the characters are warning everyone about . – Germain Lussier, io9.com

Don’t Look Up is one of the best pictures this year . – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

Wasted time isn’t merely the function of McKay’s ultra-depressing farce, it’s also the central focus of a film that begs viewers to do something better with the time they have left . – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Does it hit too close to home?

It is extremely believable that if this same situation occurred, and it could, the results would be the same. And that is scary . – Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky

Don’t Look Up has the misfortune of being too prophetic . – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

The commentary is disturbingly relevant but so funny that the audience can still enjoy watching it . – Nicole Ackman, Your Money Geek

(Photo by Niko Tavernise/Netflix)

Will Adam McKay fans enjoy it?

Don’t Look Up is, by far, the strongest, most searing piece of cinema writer/director Adam McKay has put before us . – Douglas Davidson, Elements of Madness

I would easily consider Don’t Look Up to be my favorite of McKay’s films . – Nicole Ackman, Your Money Geek

Adam McKay’s satire about our current facts-averse political divide and incompetent government is his best yet . – Nathaniel Rogers, The Film Experience

McKay detractors won’t be converted, but fans of his flicks are in for another smart and vicious treat . – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

How does it compare to other disaster movies?

Don’t Look Up is a better movie than those of that ilk . – Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

The film is the ultimate disaster movie, timely in its subject matter and ambitious in its execution . – Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant

Don’t Look Up is essentially Deep Impact played for yuks, Armageddon if it had a brain . – Ian Freer, Empire Magazine

As executed, Don’t Look U p plays like the leftie answer to Armageddon . – Peter Debruge, Variety

Does it work as satire?

In his political wheelhouse, McKay’s satire feels both too funny to be true and spot-on . – Ian Freer, Empire Magazine

Don’t Look Up is likely to go down as this generation’s Dr. Strangelove . – James Croot, stuff.co.nz

Dr. Strangelove it ain’t . – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

It feels less like satire and more like an unfortunate prediction for how America would handle a situation like this . – Nicole Ackman, Your Money Geek

Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry in Don't Look Up

How funny is it?

Laugh out loud hysterical . – Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky

Don’t Look Up might be the funniest movie of 2021 . – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Genuinely much funnier than McKay’s other prestige films, if chiefly due to excellent comedic performances . – Ethan Vestby, The Film Stage

The film is often very amusing – perhaps proving that McKay is still at his best as a director of straightforward comedy . – Peter Cremona, Radio Times

Never hilarious. It’s simply consistently amusing . – Sean Mulvihill, FanboyNation

Will you feel other things as you watch it?

I was in a mixture of shock and horror until I was, ultimately, in tears . – Douglas Davidson, Elements of Madness

This McKay film is more than its punchline. There’s real heart here . – Robert Daniels, Inverse

Don’t Look Up sure takes you on an emotional journey . – Andrew Webster, The Verge

McKay can’t decide whether he wants to amuse or upset us . – Peter Debruge, Variety

How is Leonardo DiCaprio?

It’s not the most impressive work he’s ever done, but it’s a reminder that he can excel in a role that downplays his movie-star charisma . – Nicole Ackman, Your Money Geek

Another reminder that he ought to do more comedies . – Nathaniel Rogers, The Film Experience

It’s an Oscar-worthy performance for DiCaprio! – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

DiCaprio seemingly should have a good shot [at] Best Actor . – Joey Magidson, Awards Radar

What about the rest of the ensemble cast?

This movie is stacked with talent… everyone brings it . – Andrew Webster, The Verge

One of the best ensemble casts ever… on the same level as It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World . – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

There’s not a bad performance in the movie, and it really proves that Adam McKay is one of the better actors’ directors working today . – Sean Mulvihill, FanboyNation

If there were Oscars given for casting (sort it, Academy), Francine Maisler would be a shoo-in for the 2022 gong . – Ian Freer, Empire Magazine

Meryl Streep and Mark Rylance in Don't Look Up

Are there any standouts?

Streep is a riot as a clueless President, while [Jonah] Hill steals every scene he is in . – Pete Hammond, Deadline

The MVP though is Mark Rylance…a transformative performance that sees Rylance steal every scene he’s in, and it’s a testament to him that however weird it gets, it still feels horrifyingly authentic . – Ian Sandwell, Digital Spy

The cast is nothing short of sensational, with Mark Rylance, as a Steve Jobs-like tech genius who plans to profit from the comet, particularly brilliant . – James Mottram, South China Morning Post

Hopefully this will be the first of many film collaborations for Streep and Rylance, because they’re a scrumptious combo . – Charlotte O’Sullivan, London Evening Standard

Melanie Lynskey is low-key brilliant. – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Does it go on a bit too long?

It stretches on perhaps a little too long — the movie clocks in at nearly two and a half hours — but the journey Don’t Look Up takes viewers on is mesmerizing . – Andrew Webster, The Verge

While the middle of the film drags a bit, it is able to keep the audience engaged with its fast-paced dialogue and editing . – Nicole Ackman, Your Money Geek

This ensemble cast is so good at what they do, that they propel the story forward and keep the pacing going so that it never really drags . – Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky

Will you want to see it more than once?

Don’t Look Up is a film that only improves with each viewing. I’ve seen it twice now and it gets better each time . – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

Nightmare Alley is in theaters on December 10, 2021 and streaming on Netflix on December 24, 2021.

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'Don't Look Up' delivers a punch in comet-themed climate change film satire (review)

Science is perfectly at the forefront of this star-studded story, but will the jokes connect with a wide audience?

It's only four minutes into the new Netflix comet impact film "Don't Look Up" when astrophysicist Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio, "Inception"; "Before the Flood") makes his first mistake.

Mindy is leading a team trying to figure out the position and pathway of the newly discovered object, "and that will check the distance between the comet and planet Earth ," he tells a small group of colleagues assembled in the observatory.

As Mindy scribbles numbers on a whiteboard, Ph.D. candidate and comet discoverer Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence, "Passengers" ; "X-Men: Dark Phoenix") asks why the distances keep getting smaller and smaller in the calculations. Mindy writes a 0.0 on the board, erases it, breathes deeply. Does he tell his friends the truth?

"You know what, guys, let's call it a night," he says, asking Dibiasky to stay behind to figure out what to do next. Their shared secret — that the comet is about to wallop our planet in a few months — eventually lands them in the Oval Office of the White House, with problems their previous lives never prepared them for.

Related: Just how many threatening asteroids are there? It's complicated.

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You can catch the whole film Dec. 10 in select theatres and Dec. 24 on Netflix. (Parental caution: like many McKay films, this movie occasionally gets raunchy, and uses strong language. It's rated R.)

In numerous media interviews, director Adam McKay ("Vice"; "The Big Short") has said the fictional Comet Dibiasky — which will inevitably hit Earth in six months in "Don't Look Up" — is meant to be a discussion on how the topic of climate change is manipulated by the media, Big Tech and politics. We also learn quickly that the scientists, even though committed to the data, can get hurt by the results.

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You can see that Dibiasky and Mindy are resolutely committed to tell the truth, yet unprepared for how a public used to memes, tweets and TikToks will take the devastating news. After their first appearance on a huge TV talk show, the astronomers' trajectories quickly spiral out of control from already difficult lives; Dibiasky is just about to defend her lengthy dissertation, while Mindy is on numerous medications to manage long-standing anxiety from his job.

Making things worse, the U.S. president they connect with — Janie Orlean (a giddy Meryl Streep, "The Devil Wears Prada") — is more concerned with a brewing sex scandal than with the potential end of the world. And instead of tasking the military and NASA to "work the problem" in the style of " Apollo 13 ", she ignores the advice of NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office (McKay jokes with viewers in a fourth-wall-breaking graphic that yes, the unlikely name is real) and has the military surveil the astronomers in case they say anything that will hurt her politically.

Orlean gives a despairing and devastatingly funny interpretation of presidential politics that McKay says borrows from all administrations of the past 50 years, although viewers likely will see Clinton and Trump most readily. (The tagline "Don't Look Up" refers to a disinformation campaign Orlean leads later in the film.)

Private interests inevitably, too, start to get involved. Media company CEO Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance, "Ready Player One") promises a sudden pivot from enhanced reality technology to incredible space robots. (Isherwell is meant to be an amalgamation of space CEOs such as Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin , who both had origins in the tech boom of the early 2000s.)

And this summary only touches on a portion of all the celebrity appearances, which are sure to keep viewers saying almost every five minutes: "That's so-and-so!" We won't spoil all the cameos, except to say space fans will love the performance of Timothée Chalamet of "Dune" (2021), who plays a skateboarding kid with a soft side for learning about new things.

There have been so many comet impact films out there (most recently, 2020's "Greenland" ) that we do appreciate McKay's care in trying to say something new about how everyone would react to such a disaster. Thinking all the way back to films such as 1998's controversial "Armageddon" , despite its faults we didn't get near this amount of debate about the fact of a comet hitting Earth. Rather, older films focused more on the best way to smash a comet to oblivion, or to run from it.

McKay has been pivoting to political thrillers quickly, and viewers of "The Campaign" (2012) and "Vice" (2018) will probably see a lot of analogies in "Don't Look Up." But unlike those earlier satires, it's a slow burn. "Don't Look Up" focuses on world-building so much in its first two-thirds that it's hard to pick out a film direction. It's as much a commentary on what happens to private figures thrust into the public eye as how bad news gets manipulated. It's smart, it's funny, but it's hard to connect with any emotion until late in the film.

For me, my attention really honed in during the disinformation campaign and a stadium-sized rally, featuring a breathtaking performance from a costumed, floating Riley Bina (Ariana Grande). Grande is trying to illustrate through art the need to listen to the truth, sort of like a younger Bono. But I couldn't help but wonder if that theme came too late in the film for most of us to stick around, given it appeared around the 90-minute mark.

Jennifer Lawrence Leonardo DiCaprio Don't Look Up

That said, waiting around will reward you with a lot of Easter eggs: an epic speech that echoes the "Mad as Hell" monolog from the 1976's "Network", an enraged character harmlessly using a weapon for something hilarious and unexpected, and stunning views of the comet sweeping past planets and creeping ever closer in Earth's sky, where it appears a lot like the close flyer C/1995 O1 Hale-Bopp .

— NASA launches DART asteroid mission to destroy a spacecraft to (potentially) save planet Earth

— Meet LICIACube, the small but mighty spacecraft that will watch NASA's epic DART asteroid crash

— If an asteroid really threatened the Earth, what would a planetary defense mission look like?

I also was impressed with the commitment to comet science, between discussions of what an ephemeris means, to the rather realistic portrayal of the jetting and tumbling the comet core experiences. You can tell McKay did listen closely to science advisor Amy Mainzer, a renowned asteroid researcher and professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona.

In sum, "Don't Look Up" is a love letter to science and the people who defend it, and a smart commentary on how climate change can become weaponized and politicized to serve interests outside of the public need. But will a wide audience appreciate the subtle arguments? We can only hope the star power will draw them in for this critical, yet funny commentary on the interests of media, the politicians and big tech when it comes to dealing with difficult scientific matters.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, " Why Am I Taller ?", is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada's Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada's Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada's Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace

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Don’t Look Up is an absurdist mirror of our reality — before it just becomes a regular mirror

Netflix’s latest star-laden film is an emotional ride through the absurd.

By Andrew Webster , an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

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For a goofy satire about a comet destroying the planet, Don’t Look Up sure takes you on an emotional journey. The film — helmed by writer and director Adam McKay, best-known for movies like Step Brothers and Anchorman — starts out hilarious, with big-name stars trading one-liners amid an impending apocalypse. But over its lengthy runtime, it slowly morphs into something else. Laughs give way to anger, frustration, and ultimately a kind of desperate hope. It’s a trajectory that serves as an eerie mirror to the last two years of pandemic life — just don’t go in expecting lighthearted fun.

Don’t Look Up doesn’t waste any time getting going. It starts out with a pair of Michigan State astronomers, Randall (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate (Jennifer Lawrence), discovering a massive comet in the sky that’s somewhere between five and 10 kilometers wide. But the excitement of discovery quickly turns to dread, as the pair realize that it’s on a collision course with Earth, and it will cause an extinction-level event in around six months. They rush to the White House to inform the president, played by Meryl Streep, only to be left waiting for hours as she deals with a much more pressing dilemma involving nude models. What follows is a delightfully goofy exchange, where the president and her chief of staff (Jonah Hill) who is also her self-absorbed son, debate the political ramifications of revealing that everyone is about to die ahead of midterms. “The timing, it’s just atrocious,” the president tells them, while noting that she’ll have her own people — from an Ivy League school, of course — assess things.

It would all be absurd if it didn’t feel so close to reality. What should be the only thing that matters to everyone on the planet — finding a way to avoid the destruction of all life — gets drowned out by election season and, later, a celebrity breakup. Early on, this contrast is played up for laughs; the astronomers struggle to get their message across because no one wants to hear bad news. They go on a talk show where they’re told to keep things light. When Kate (Lawrence) explodes in frustration and tells the hosts that everyone is going to die, she becomes a meme.

The absurdism that mirrors our own reality a little too neatly is helped along by a tremendous cast. This movie is stacked with talent. I could watch Streep and Hill banter all day long, and Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi are perfectly cast as the on again, off again pop star power couple. Meanwhile, Lawrence does an amazing job of channeling the anger I know I’d be feeling in her position. Other actors do great work with smaller-but-vital roles; Timothée Chalamet as a painfully earnest Twitch streamer / skate punk, Ron Perlman as a definitely racist war hero. Everyone brings it.

But slowly that good humor gives way and Don’t Look Up gets uncomfortably real. Once the message gets out there, it becomes polarizing. Randall (DiCaprio) turns into a social media star, a hunky scientist who is the face of the government’s constantly shifting plan to try to deflect the comet, while Kate becomes a pariah because of her realist attitude. A chunk of space rock that will eviscerate life on Earth ends up creating political divides. Some are terrified, others don’t believe it’s even real. While working class voters turn hopeful about the jobs the comet will provide, an evil tech mogul salivates at all of the rare Earth metals it contains. At one point Randall is forced to ask: what’s the point of trillions of dollars if we’re all dead? He’s laughed out of the room.

It’s infuriating watching the population argue instead of work together to ensure their literal survival. Sadly, little of the movie seems far-fetched given… well, the past two years on the real planet Earth. We’ve all seen the divides that come from a true existential crisis during the pandemic, and Don’t Look Up is an uncanny reflection of that reality. You could call aspects of it goofy or unrealistic, but then again many of us spent the early days of the pandemic learning to bake bread while watching Tiger King . Don’t Look Up exaggerates a bit, but it’s not too far off the mark.

It stretches on perhaps a little too long — the movie clocks in at nearly two and a half hours — but the journey Don’t Look Up takes viewers on is mesmerizing. I went from laughing at the absurdity of a military general scamming some astronomers out of $20 to being genuinely mad at everyone not only ignoring the obvious but, in some cases, rooting for the damn comet. Toward the end, when the collision becomes impossible to ignore, I just felt bad for everyone involved. Don’t Look Up has a largely dismal outlook on humanity, but it ends on a surprisingly hopeful note. (You should definitely stick around for the credits where it wraps back around to being hilarious.)

I’m not sure if the film made me realize anything new about myself or life during the pandemic, but it was certainly cathartic to see it all play out in such dramatic fashion.

Don’t Look Up is coming to select theaters on December 10th, before hitting Netflix on December 24th.

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Don't Look Up review: The sky is falling in Adam McKay's starry, silly disaster flick

The world ends not with a bang, but a DiCaprio.

Adam McKay has made a rich career out of satire — an equal-opportunity parodist of blundering NASCAR drivers ( Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby ), walrus-mustachioed TV bohunks ( Anchorman ), and rogue vice presidents ( Vice ). In 2015's The Big Short , he gave us Margot Robbie explaining subprime mortgages in a bubble bath and Ryan Gosling breaking down big-bank malfeasance with a stack of Jenga blocks.

So he seems like exactly the guy, in other words, to take on the broad insanity of… whatever you would call the last five years of American life. And that is what the writer-director does — indeed pretty broadly — in Don't Look Up , a winking indictment of climate-change deniers and alternative-fact peddlers told on a global scale. The result feels a little like Mars Attacks! , if the call were coming from inside the house: a disaster movie all dressed up for the apocalypse with too many movie stars to count and not quite enough punchlines.

Which isn't to say it's no fun: The film (in theaters this Friday and on Netflix Dec. 24), gets enough mileage out of Cate Blanchett' s bioluminescent teeth alone to nearly justify the ride. But McKay seems hamstrung perhaps by the sheer absurdity of what he's supposed to be lampooning; how do you parodize a parody? You start by putting two of the world's most famous actors in normal-people drag: Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are, respectively, Dr. Randall Mindy and Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky, both astrophysicists at Michigan State. He's a nice, anxious dad with an overgrown goatee and a comfy sweater bod; she's got two nose rings and looks like an angry bird cut her bangs with kitchen shears.

What's not in doubt is the pair's scientific bona fides, and Kate has found a comet that has a 100 percent chance of impacting Earth in just over six months and destroying it entirely. That discovery quickly earns them an audience with President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), a power-suited #LadyBoss with a blond cascade of Real Housewife barrel curls and a picture of herself with Steven Seagal in a place of pride on her Oval Office desk. Her reaction to the news, eagerly supported by her frat-boy son and chief of staff ( Jonah Hill ), is to "sit tight and assess." It's weeks before the midterms, see, and if everybody on the planet learns they're about to die in a ball of fire, they'll lose the election — which is just, you know, atrocious timing for everyone.

There's also a billionaire mogul named Peter Isherwell, played by Oscar winner Mark Rylance as a sort of eerie bionic wraith (no one ever explicitly says which tech CEO inspired him, though there's a good chance it rhymes with Shmark Shmuckerberg). Peter has his own plans for the comet, and his own "scientists" too. Randall and Kate going on a popular info-tainment show hosted by Blanchett's gleaming, ruthless Brie Evantee and her jocular coanchor Jack Brenner (Tyler Perry) doesn't really help their case; Kate's desperate Howard Beale speech when she realizes that both hosts, like the POTUS, care more about their own Q ratings than the end of the world make her nothing but an instant laughing-stock meme.

McKay lands a few clean arrows in all this, not least with Rylance's spooky plasticity (the banality of evil, indeed). And his casting cup overruns almost casually with A-list guests, from a distinctly silly Ariana Grande cameo to a charming and markedly more substantial turn by Timothée Chalamet as a delinquent skateboarder with a thing for Kate's choppy bangs. (Melanie Lynskey is great too as Dr. Randall's too-wise wife, semi-abandoned in the wake of his astronomical new fame.) Frankly, it's almost enough just to watch them all run around in states that range from manic panic to Zen serenity while McKay employs his usual coterie of meta tricks and treats. But it's hard not to long for the shrewder movie that might have been: Not just a kooky scattershot look, but a deeper truer gaze into the void. Grade: B

Don’t Look Up is a hellishly unfunny ride through The Discourse

Even wildly talented actors can’t save a movie that repeats arguments we have every day

by Joshua Rivera

President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) points beside a podium in front of the American flag in the Netflix film Don’t Look Up

There’s dark credibility to Don’t Look Up , director Adam McKay’s gallows humor Netflix comedy about the end of the world. In it, scientists discover that a planet-killing comet is heading directly for Earth, and our window for averting extinction is incredibly narrow. When this urgent news is brought to the United States government, the response is one that is extremely plausible: doing nothing.

This isn’t so much a profound insight as a reasonable conclusion drawn from current events. Recurring gun violence, civil rights crises, or the ongoing pandemic response are all proof positive for a political reality defined by inaction, where needles only move when lawmakers’ careers — or private sector profits — are at stake. Don’t Look Up has little to offer beyond this, and even fewer laughs.

The film begins with astronomy student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovering an unidentified comet. What starts as an exciting find for a budding astronomer quickly turns to horror as she and her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), calculate the comet’s trajectory, finding that it’s on a collision course with Earth.

Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as Kate Dibiasky and Randall Mindy sit in an empty cargo plane in Netflix’s Don’t Look Up

Written by McKay from a story by the filmmaker and political wonk David Sirota, Don’t Look Up is a 138-minute tour through what we, for lack of a better term, can call The Discourse, the cultural-political attention economy through which major events are filtered by way of many competing interests. It starts at the top: The president (Meryl Streep) waves off Kate and Dr. Mindy’s news because she’s so consumed by political scandal that she can’t even meet with them for an entire day. She’s too busy figuring out how to respond to her Supreme Court nominee’s nudes being leaked.

Dismissed by the government, Kate and Dr. Mindy turn to the media. The reception isn’t any better. Traditional publications are interested only in social media engagement, and they back away under the threat of a lawsuit, while a daytime TV show is mostly interested in Randall’s meme-worthy good looks. For the general public, the meteor becomes a litmus test for personal politics.

Great performances keep Don’t Look Up afloat, if only barely. Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett are delightfully banal talk show hosts, Timothée Chalamet is a late-game breath of fresh air as a born-again skater punk, and Lawrence and DiCaprio are both actors so talented that the hope that McKay can turn things around by the end never quite extinguishes.

Astronomers Dr. Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky sit in on a morning show called The Daily Rip, hosted by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry, in Netflix’s Don’t Look Up.

In all this, Don’t Look Up becomes a work of well-acted exhaustion. It’s not very interesting to see this cycle play out in a hypothetical context because this particular media circus is already repeated ad nauseum. McKay wastes his talented ensemble by having them labor in the service of virtually nothing, as his film has little to say about why we are trapped in these cycles, and it doesn’t seem to offer anything beyond the greatest hits of a bad few months online. If the jokes about daytime television, internet memes, or political ineptitude were funnier, this would be forgivable. Humor is subjective, but giving an example of Don’t Look Up ’s specific jokes feels like a spoiler, depriving you of one of the three times you’ll likely experience a genuine laugh.

McKay’s previous satirical comedies The Big Short and Vice , while divisive, were clearly focused on the powerful. They were cynical works about the cynicism of American economics and politics, operating from the presumption that the audience for each had been kept in the dark on their subjects. This was easy to get on board with when The Big Short digestibly broke down the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis , and arguably less so when Vice delved into the career of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Don’t Look Up doesn’t have as clear of a target, so instead it swings at everyone. Its worst parts are when it stops to show people on their phones. They tweet inanity, they participate in dumb viral challenges, they tune into propaganda and formulate conspiracy theory. At no point does Don’t Look Up ’s script demonstrate an interest in why these people do these things, or what causes these online phenomena. Despite this being a central aspect of his story, McKay doesn’t seem to think it worthy of consideration. There’s a word for that: contempt.

Don’t Look Up is currently playing in theaters and will premiere on Netflix on Dec. 24.

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Late into the unwieldy end-of-days satire “Don’t Look Up,” writer-director Adam McKay briefly sets aside the easy snark and broad targets and reaches for a note of awe. He just about hits it. An enormous comet has appeared in the night sky, finally visible to the naked eye after having spent months making a beeline for Earth. It’s a terrifying sight but also a sublime one, a vision of inexorably approaching doom that — with an assist from a teary-eyed Leonardo DiCaprio and a gorgeously churning score by “Succession’s” Nicholas Britell — can’t help but stir a collective sense of wonder.

A moment like that stands in pointed opposition to the social malaise being diagnosed in “Don’t Look Up,” a semi-sweet, mostly sour comic dispatch from a world where wonder is for dummies and collective unity is a joke. A pre-apocalyptic satire about mass-media cynicism, political cronyism, Big Tech corruption, general American stupidity and anything else McKay and his co-writer, David Sirota, can squeeze into their crowded fish barrel, the movie is also its own high-concept genre collision, one that we might describe as Armageddon Iannucci . We are jolted along by an end-of-days blockbuster like “Deep Impact” (the art-house-inclined can throw in “Melancholia” ) but also swept up in a behind-the-scenes realpolitik farce like “Dr. Strangelove” or “In the Loop.”

Those are daunting inspirations in service of a reasonably inspired premise. It begins with a Michigan State PhD candidate, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), peering into the heavens and making a startling astronomical discovery. Comet Dibiasky, as it will be known, is speeding toward Earth and will make impact in a little more than six months; given that the comet is roughly 5 to 10 kilometers wide, it’s designated a “planet killer,” an extinction-level event waiting to happen. Dibiasky and her twitchy mentor, Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio), report their findings to NASA and are promptly flown out to the White House, where their shock, pride and anxiety at being the bearers of such bad news are swiftly derailed by their utter disbelief at the corruption and incompetence that await them.

McKay and Sirota, a journalist and former advisor/speechwriter for the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, serve up a smorgasbord of satirical jabs plucked from the political detritus of the past four years and beyond: Oval Office nepotism, grossly unqualified Supreme Court picks, midterm election anxieties, war-room photo ops, sex scandals. The president, Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), is a hack and a buffoon surrounded by many, none more poisonous than her high-ranking son, Jason (Jonah Hill in relentless insult-comic mode). She wastes no time minimalizing, trivializing and even flat-out ignoring the scientists’ findings, dismissing them as the latest of many exaggerated doomsday proclamations to cross her desk.

A woman and a man on a TV set, seated at a desk that holds several coffee mugs.

These scenes would be funnier if they were more incisively written (or at least more cleverly improvised), and also if the movie seemed to be actively critiquing rather than merely embodying the laziness of its targets. (Streep, who played a sharper politician in “The Manchurian Candidate” and a nicer Orlean in “Adaptation,” is here reduced to smirking reaction shots in a rare witless turn.) They also would be funnier if there weren’t a surfeit of depressing real-world evidence to back up the movie’s depressing conclusions.

What if the world were ending and no one gave a damn, including most of the people in a position to actually do something about it? That’s been more or less the decades-long story of climate change, which provided the original impetus for McKay’s satire (and surely helped secure DiCaprio’s interest ). But that allegorical dimension has since been temporarily eclipsed by the COVID-19 pandemic, whose rampant misinformation campaigns have caused hundreds of thousands of pointless, preventable human deaths.

The comet’s death toll of course looks to be in the billions, which spurs Dibiasky and Mindy to disregard the president’s confidentiality orders and take their story public. But the news and entertainment media, much like the government they ostensibly exist to cover and critique, turn out to be no more interested in the substance of what the scientists have to say. A well-matched Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry play a couple of morning talk-show chuckleheads who turn our heroes into inadvertent celebrities, though markedly different ones. While Mindy’s charming awkwardness quickly makes him America’s sexiest scientist (on par with a younger Dr. Fauci), Dibiasky’s expletive-laced on-air meltdown makes her a figure of instant ridicule — the butt of a joke shared by millions of merry consumers who prefer to meme and hashtag while Rome burns.

There’s an obvious strain of sexism in how Mindy and Dibiasky are received, and “Don’t Look Up,” again, has a way of subtly reinforcing what it’s ostensibly calling out. Both lead actors have dowdied themselves up to play a couple of Midwestern nerds: DiCaprio with plaid shirts and a thick beard, Lawrence with an auburn dye job and nose piercings. But there’s something telling (and selectively star-flattering) about the way Mindy is written as an Insta-thirst object, threatening his marriage (to a wonderful Melanie Lynskey), while Dibiasky gets called things like “Boy With the Dragon Tattoo.” (OK, I laughed, but I winced.) It’s also telling that when Mindy gets his own expletive-laced on-air meltdown in the second act, reaching for a real Peter-Finch-in-“Network” moment, it’s played for gravitas rather than ridicule.

I mention this because the unequal treatment of the sexes is hardly incidental to McKay’s project (or, for that matter, his earlier movies, from the bro-comedy highs of “Anchorman” and “Step Brothers” to the aggressively topical likes of “The Big Short” and “Vice”). It supplies “Don’t Look Up” with a satirical thrust, a narrative engine and an overall atmosphere as thin and spotty as the one separating us from all those Earth-bound projectiles. The movie does try to right the balance too, partly through Streep’s blandly Trumpy commander-in-chief, and more successfully via Blanchett’s Mika Brzezinski-esque anchor, who’s shown concealing her own impressive intellect behind a camera-ready mega-watt smile.

A man and a woman stare at his cellphone.

It also helps that DiCaprio and Lawrence have solid lead-duo chemistry, forging an emotional connection born of mutual respect and serious intellectual credentials. (Lawrence gets a particularly juicy comic bit I won’t spoil, except to say that it sneaks up on you a little more and kills a little harder each time.) And you can’t help but feel for Mindy and Dibiasky, who are the canaries in this movie’s late-capitalist coal mine, two malfunctioning cogs in the mind-numbing machine that our 21st century society has become. Their gravest enemy is not the president so much as an Orwellian billionaire tech visionary (Mark Rylance), who dreams of global domination and gives off an obvious whiff of Bezos, Branson and Musk.

Rylance, as always, has his moments. But his character, scarily white teeth notwithstanding, exemplifies the fundamental toothlessness of a satire whose targets are somehow too specific to seem imaginative but also too vague to land a real blow. The fault is not McKay and Sirota’s alone. Watching “Don’t Look Up,” with its mix of occasional big laughs (the Ariana Grande number legitimately slays) and scattershot non sequiturs, I couldn’t help but fear for the long-term viability of the Hollywood media-political satire as a genre.

Nothing about the foolishness and outrageousness of what the movie shows us — no matter how virtuosically sliced and diced by McKay’s characteristically jittery editor, Hank Corwin — can really compete with the horrors of our real-world American idiocracy. (But speaking of which: Would it have killed the movie to define the world as something bigger than the U.S. of A.?)

In “Don’t Look Up,” evil is finally too banal to be funny (though as one character aptly points out, “They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for”). Goodness, however, can still generate a shockwave of feeling, and the best moments here make the case for small, redemptive acts of decency in the face of the unthinkable. I wish Rob Morgan’s NASA expert had more to do here besides stand in silent contempt of all the inanity swirling around him. I also wouldn’t have minded more of Timothée Chalamet as the sweetly sincere Christian skateboarder who kick-flips his way into Dibiasky’s life. He shows up late but you’re grateful regardless; he makes the end that much more of a mercy.

‘Don’t Look Up’

Rating: R, for language throughout, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes Playing: Starts Dec. 10 in general release; available Dec. 24 on Netflix

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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The Crude Demagogy of “Don’t Look Up”

Adam McKay’s satire “Don’t Look Up” is a clever film that’s short on wit. The difference is that wit is multifaceted, like a gem that, however small, offers different glimmers at different angles. Cleverness exhausts itself in a single glint and then repeats itself to infinity.

“Don’t Look Up,” for the record, tells the story of the discovery of a huge comet that’s heading for a direct strike on Earth that would end life on the planet; the degraded journalistic environment that trivializes the discovery and minimizes the danger; and the feckless President whose self-interested blunders allow the comet to strike, catastrophically. It’s a raucous comedy in which a tale built of near-plausible elements is told by way of exaggerated character traits, absurd situations, and high-wattage star performances. It’s also a movie about the blighted mediasphere—yet, even with the best of intentions, the movie only adds to the blight.

The comet is discovered by Kate Dibiasky ( Jennifer Lawrence ), a graduate student in astronomy at Michigan State; its trajectory toward Earth is discovered by her adviser, Dr. Randall Mindy ( Leonardo DiCaprio ), and they calculate that it will strike in a mere six months. They reach out to NASA and are put in touch with Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), the head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (a real federal bureau, as a supertitle informs viewers), who rushes them to the White House to deliver the news in person to the President, Janie Orlean ( Meryl Streep ). Her political party isn’t specified (nobody’s is—there’s no reference to real-world politics in the film) but her actions resemble those of Donald Trump: she nominates a Supreme Court Justice of dubious qualification and sexual scandal, falsifies scientific data to seek advantage in the midterm elections, and leaves an underling’s public racist remarks unchallenged.

When President Orlean treats the evidence and the three scientists dismissively, they go public with the news that the world is about to end. Kate and Randall talk to journalists from the New York Herald (its logo uses the same typeface as the Times ) and go on a morning talk show, where they’re admonished to “keep it light.” Amid the quippy chat of the hosts, Jack ( Tyler Perry ) and Brie ( Cate Blanchett ), Kate and Randall’s apocalyptic warnings are brushed aside until Kate starts yelling on the air, making enemies of the hosts and becoming a derided social-media meme. When the President finds it politically expedient to do so, she mounts a mission to deflect the comet, exactly as the best science recommends—and then, at the urging of a tech billionaire named Peter Isherwell ( Mark Rylance ), she cancels the mission and lets Peter attempt to harvest an untold fortune in rare-earth minerals from the comet instead. Meanwhile, the public is divided between those who trust the science and those who call the comet a hoax—between realists who implore their neighbors to look up at the comet and acknowledge the looming menace, and denialists whose slogan lends the movie its title.

The movie’s comedic energy comes mainly from its asides and sidebars—from the brazen rich-bully snark of the President’s fratty, young chief of staff, Jason ( Jonah Hill ), who’s also her son, and the promotion of a disaster film called “Total Devastation” that’s scheduled for release on the day that that comet is expected to hit, to the Internet shitposter charging that “Jewish billionaires invented this comet threat so the government can confiscate our liberty and our guns,” and the national obsession with the love life of the pop star Riley Bina ( Ariana Grande ), who ultimately joins Kate and Randall at the “For Real Last Concert to Save the World,” where she croons a romantic ballad with such grimly hilarious lyrics as, “Get your head out of your ass, listen to the goddam qualified scientists. We really fucked it up . . . You’re about to die soon, everybody.”

The journalists at the Herald, rather than throwing their weight behind the scientists’ discovery of the killer comet and its impending strike, obsess about social-media engagement and quickly let the depressing story die; Peter does a staged product rollout, using children as near-robotic props, where an announcer cautions audience members not to make eye contact with him and to avoid “negative facial expressions.” In the talk-show green room, Kate rejects a dress that a stylist brings over, but Randall lets the stylist trim his beard even as he’s fending off a panic attack. The scene foreshadows his transformation into a television celebrity and a sort of nerdy sex object, who then gets co-opted into government service to give the corrupt Administration the cover of scientific legitimacy. The best of the riffs—because seemingly random and oblique yet ultimately capped with a one-liner of political psychology that’s deeper and more mysterious than anything else in the film—is the trivial twist of a three-star general (Paul Guilfoyle) who, outside the Oval Office, charges the scientists heftily for chips and water (which are supposed to be free).

It’s no surprise to learn that the actors improvised copiously, because the movie has a riffy and zingy feel to it. Yet the rapid editing of nearly arbitrarily composed images creates a straitlaced rigidity. The tone of improv comedy comes without the sense of risk; the one-liners are hammered into the confines of character and story like tiles in a grid, and the only excesses are a handful of eruptive, televised tirades that play like emblematic “Network” moments to rouse viewers’ fist pumps. What is surprising is that the script was written before the COVID pandemic—the movie is a startlingly accurate view of the willful and venal denialism that afflicted responses to the crisis at all levels of government and business, and that has been matched throughout by the cultlike rejection of medical counsel by individuals in all strata and sectors of society.

Those cognate details, and the fast comedic dialogue (the President’s vain babble, Brie’s coldly cynical bedroom banter), make “Don’t Look Up” stand out, at the very least, as an on-target political cartoon expanded to the scale of a grandiose mural, with all the pomposity and monotony that such an inflation suggests. The movie lives by its place in the discourse, such as that discourse is. It satirizes the trivializing flow of celebrity gossip and light-toned frivolity, of clickbait pushing aside investigative reporting and of tech moguls not only usurping government power but commandeering public discourse. Yet its own anti-aesthetic of neutral images and predigested narrative efficiency, its celebrity feast of star turns and flashy performances, and its simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing mask the movie’s fundamental position of getting itself talked about while utterly eliding any real sense of politics or political confrontation. It is set largely in and around government, but suggests nothing like any political opposition, such as in Congress or state houses, to President Orlean’s actions and inaction regarding the comet. (The closest to it is the wishful radical populism of Orlean supporters’ spontaneous uprising at a rally where they realize they’ve been lied to.)

The movie’s built-in ambition appears to be simply crude demagogy, reaching an apotheosis in viewers who’ve just watched at home opening their poorly insulated windows and yelling into the street, “Climate change is real!,” without any demand of policy or awareness of actions that the need to slow it might demand. The blame goes on the Peter Isherwells of the world, who seek to profit from it, the Orleans, who deny it or manipulate it for the sake of power; it’s assumed that their lies and distortions are all that keep ordinary people from demanding action. There’s no sense of political psychology, of the tendency of people to look first to immediate personal interest and needs—whether employment or income, convenience or sustenance—and either consider climate change to be distantly abstract or suspect that their present-tense well-being would be sacrificed to climate-favorable policies.

Instead of a political movie, “Don’t Look Up” is a cynical one. It’s basically a Jill Stein movie, a shrug that there’s no difference between the parties, that government is in the corrupt pocket of business and that the élites of all sorts are indifferent to the country’s actual interests. (Though there’s no mention of parties, the movie pointedly shows a picture on the President’s desk showing her beaming side by side with Bill Clinton.)

Why does Hollywood tackle environmental calamity? Why do stars get involved in wildlife conservation? Why are there so few celebrities who put their name and their talent behind, say, voting rights—without which no progressive project such as the Green New Deal has the slightest chance of being signed into law? It’s not only because everyone loves animals, or because movie stars prefer to spend their vacations in the distant wild than in Maricopa County but because it would be impossible to make a film about the suppression of voting rights without considering whose rights are being abrogated, who’s doing so, and which categories of voters supports the measures. The critique of climate change, by contrast, allows the targeting of mega-businesses and political leaders while leaving individuals—meaning, potential moviegoers and ticket-buyers—outside the scope of criticism. In short, what Hollywood people don’t want to do is to critique a political party, because there goes half the potential box office.

In “Don’t Look Up,” the star of “Total Devastation” (played by Chris Evans) makes a promotional appearance wearing a pin of his own devising, a double-headed arrow pointing both up and down, which he explains as his effort to see both sides of the issue and overcome the nation’s divisions. What he’s really insuring is the preservation of a single, unified, indivisible mass of prospective moviegoers and ticket-buyers. “Don’t Look Up” may be aptly unambiguous regarding the notion and danger of climate change itself, but when it comes to the politics that underlie anti-environmental policies, McKay might as well be wearing that very pin.

The movie’s merits and flaws are independent of any public remarks by McKay and the movie’s co-creator, David Sirota, including of their tweets suggesting, respectively, that anyone who thinks negatively of it is unconcerned about climate change, and that its detractors are exactly the oblivious media fools that the film is lampooning. Such remarks should be understood as part of the ad campaign, as skew to the merits of the film itself—even if the filmmakers’ assertion that their zippy entertainment is a contribution to society at large is itself a defining feature of the movie’s demagogic aesthetic. Even Marvel executives weren’t vain enough to accuse critics of “ Avengers: Infinity War ” of endorsing Thanos’s apocalyptic madness.

More than the filmmakers’ tweets, what gives a clearer sense of the movie’s toxic effect in the mediaverse is the response of climate scientists to negative reviews of it. Climate scientists have endorsed the film enthusiastically as an accurate representation of the obstacles they face in attempting to persuade politicians, the public, and even journalists of the urgency of the crisis. Dr. Michael E. Mann, a climatologist who is DiCaprio’s friend and adviser, calls it “serious sociopolitical commentary posing as comedy.” The climate futurist Alex Steffen tweets about negative reviews as “hot takes written by jaded culture workers from an alternate universe” where climate catastrophe isn’t happening.

Seems to me that, if the scientists don’t want film critics to quibble with the science, the scientists should stop meddling with the art. Yes, I’m joking; but, no, I’m not. The failure of topicality in “Don’t Look Up” is, not least, that the movie’s cynically apolitical view of politics contributes to the frivolous and self-regarding media environment that it decries—starting with the very celebrity power that the movie marshalls to score its points. Its blustery hectoring and colossally wide purview is most notable for its omissions and its blind spots. Its civic ambitions reflect, above all, the inside-Hollywood tunnel vision that it mocks.

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‘Don’t Look Up’: Broad humor undermines satire about a country in denial

Jennifer lawrence, leonardo dicaprio and an amazing cast throw their talents behind the movie’s dark but disappointingly obvious humor..

A pair of shallow TV hosts (Cate Blanchett, left, and Tyler Perry) miss the urgent points being made by astronomers Randall (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate (Jennifer Lawrence) in “Don’t Look Up.”

In Mimi Leder’s greatly entertaining if outlandishly melodramatic 1998 sci-fi disaster film “Deep Impact,” the world learns an extinction-level comet is directly on course to crash-land on Earth and potentially cause the extinction of all life as we know it.

Here’s the thing with that film. When President Morgan Freeman — OK, Freeman’s character was President Tom Beck — calls a press conference to alert the nation and the world to this approaching comet, everyone pretty much believes him, and acts accordingly. There’s not a whole lot of opposition to the science and the facts.

We live in different times, as writer-director Adam McKay makes abundantly (and repetitively) clear in the dark, intermittently funny, well-acted but far too broad and obvious “Don’t Look Up.” The title stems from the premise that even when virtually all of the world’s top astronomers have concurred a rapidly approaching comet will almost certainly wipe out the planet, and even when one can simply look up and literally see the ginormous Blazing Ball of Impending Doom in the skies above, a considerable portion of the populace won’t believe it’s real, refuses to take it seriously and/or peddles wild conspiracy theories about how this is all part of some grand plan to control us.

The “Look Up” faction says all you have to do is, well, look up, and you’ll see the irrefutable truth. The deniers counter with what they believe is a simple, common-sense retort: Just don’t look up!

Sadly, given the events of the last many years — yes, some people would embrace a “Don’t Look Up” policy if we found ourselves squarely in the path of an Earth-shattering comet. But as much as I admired McKay’s boldly creative and wickedly insightful satirical work on “The Big Short” (2015) and “Vice” (2018), this has to be categorized as one of the more disappointing efforts of the year, given the premise and the amazing cast. McKay is aiming for a modern-day “Dr. Strangelove,” but he keeps shooting fish in a barrel long after they’ve stopped flopping about.

Oscar winners abound in “Don’t Look Up,” starting with Leonardo DiCaprio as Michigan State University astronomy professor Dr. Randall Mindy and Jennifer Lawrence as his grad student, one Kate Dibiasky, who makes an amazing discovery of a comet the size of Mount Everest orbiting within our solar system. For a moment, Dr. Mindy and his team are in full celebration mode — until the data reveals this “planet killer” of a comet is heading directly towards Earth. Whoops.

Meryl Streep plays the U.S. president who dismisses the planet’s imminent doom.

Cut to the Oval Office, where the craven, publicity-minded, easily distracted President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) takes a quick meeting with Dr. Mindy, Kate and the high-ranking scientist Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), while President Orlean’s idiot son Jason, who is also her chief of staff, finds it impossible to contain his boredom and impatience as Dr. Mindy and Kate lay out the facts.

“So how certain is this?” says President Orlean.

“There is 100% certainty of impact,” comes the reply from Dr. Mindy, to which the president responds, “Don’t say 100% ... call it 70% and let’s move on.”

This is the first of many, many, many indications the fumbling but charming and passionate Dr. Mindy and the punk-rock, blunt and emotionally edgy Kate are going to have a surprisingly difficult time getting people to believe the truth. They make an appearance on an insanely chipper morning chat show called “The Daily Rip,” where the shallow, narcissistic hosts Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry) and Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett) are more interested in making jokes, turning Dr. Mindy into something of a sex symbol and moving on to the next segment than listening to the message. (After Kate goes on a rant about how they’re all going to die, Brie says the handsome astronomer is welcome back any time, but not so much with “the yelling lady.”)

Meanwhile, the world seems more interested in the latest romantic developments between the lovely and talented but breathtakingly dim pop star Riley Bina (Ariana Grande, and good for her for poking fun at herself) and her on-again, off-again partner DJ Chello (Scott Mescudi aka Kid Cudi) than in the impending end of the world. Then there’s a creepy, world-famous tech visionary (Mark Rylance, unfortunately hitting some tone-deaf notes in a distractingly strange performance), who has a grand plan for mining the comet for its trillions of dollars in valuable raw materials and THEN blowing it up, “Armageddon” style. It’s … not a good plan.

“Don’t Look Up” is wrapped in a package about a comet hurtling toward the planet but is obviously designed to be a warning about the environmental crises threatening our future, and there are some salient points and a few hearty laughs along the way. More too often, unfortunately, we’re spending time with one broad caricature after another, from the leads to relatively minor supporting players such as Ron Perlman’s gun-crazy Col. Ben Drask, who literally fires his weapons at the approaching comet, and Timothee Chalamet as an achingly sincere skateboarder who falls for Kate amidst all the chaos. From Streep and DiCaprio and Lawrence through the supporting players, “Don’t Look Up” is filled with greatly talented actors really and truly selling this material — but the volume remains at 11 throughout the story when some changes in tone here and there might have more effectively carried the day.

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When Ridley Scott released “ Prometheus ” and “ Alien: Covenant ,” the main criticism levied against them essentially boiled down to that they didn’t provide the same kind of sci-fi thrills as “ Alien ” and “ Aliens ,” two of the most beloved films of all time. Anyone who dislikes those films because they have too much philosophy and not enough acidic alien spit will be satisfied by Fede Alvarez ’s “Alien: Romulus,” a movie with so many callbacks to the entire series (even both Fincher’s “Alien 3” and William Gibson ’s unproduced script for that film have echoes here, as do the prequels) that they sometimes feel like extra weight on this movie spaceship. Luckily, Alvarez’s skill with pace and use of setting, along with his obvious love for this series, keep “Romulus” afloat. It’s fun, tense, and slimy. It’s also nowhere near as ambitious as some of the films in this series deemed failures. We can’t have everything.

There’s a definite sense that Alvarez is going back to the basics of Scott’s first film (which is a good thing). Once again, we’re introduced to a crew of interstellar blue-collar workers, led by a heroine who we know will be forced to mine veins of courage in herself that she didn’t know were there. In this case, it’s Rain Carradine ( Cailee Spaeny of “ Civil War ”), a woman who believes that she’s reached her quota of hours in a mine on a planet that never gets sunshine, only to learn that the goalposts have been moved and she can’t get off of it for nearly another decade. While mourning her murdered future with her friends, she discovers that they have a plan to raid a space station that they’ve discovered floating above the planet. Get on board, take the cryo pods needed for the trip, and wake up in a new galaxy. What could go wrong? Weyland-Yutani always has a bad answer to that question.

Rain is joined closely on this journey by Andy ( David Jonsson of “ Rye Lane ”), a synthetic whose objective is to care for Rain like a brother, and she cares for him as much in reverse. Most of the “Alien” films have used androids to ask some of their thorniest moral questions, and that’s the case again here in a number of twists that make Andy’s choices – the ones that should be guided by programming instead of human emotion – into some of the most interesting of the film. Without spoiling anything, Andy’s objective changes when the crew gets to the space station, and everyone discovers they’re not alone. Archie Renaux , Isabela Merced , Spike Fearn , and Aileen Wu star as the other travelers who will learn what a Facehugger is the hard way.

Eschewing the complex narratives of the prequels, “Romulus” has an almost charmingly direct plot: Five people and a synthetic find their way aboard a space station carrying some truly perfect killing machines and have to fight to escape. That’s about it. The thin plot allows Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues to focus on world-building and set pieces. The production design here by Naaman Marshall (who worked on " The Dark Knight " and " The Prestige ") is some of the best in a blockbuster sci-fi movie in a very long time. Like the original, there’s a sense that the space these characters occupy isn’t a sterile set but a place that has been lived – and died – in before. It’s hard to overstate the importance of that in a film like this. When we feel like the people in jeopardy are in real, three-dimensional places with histories of their own, we can feel like their plight is real too. Alvarez and his team have created a phenomenal setting on Romulus and Remus, the two halves of the space station on which almost all of this film takes place. It’s not quite as brilliantly claustrophobic as the first film, but it’s close enough, and indicative of how much Alvarez understands about why that film remains a masterpiece.

He also knows how to stage a sequence. It’s hard to pick a fave here, whether it’s the hallway run with an army of Facehuggers or the stunningly well-crafted elevator sequence, or the bonkers final scenes that are likely to be the most divisive aspect of this film. (For me, the “crazy twist,” without spoiling, fits in the legacy of a series that has always had elements of body horror embedded in it, and I wish the film took more of those kinds of big swings before the final fifteen minutes.) Editor Jake Roberts (“ Hell or High Water ”) does phenomenal work here, too, knowing exactly how to cut this film to amplify tension, and cinematographer Galo Olivares pays homage to past imagery from this series while also giving the film a sweaty, dark, foreboding visual palette of its own.

Performance has always been an essential aspect of this series, whether it’s Sigourney Weaver or Michael Fassbender , and Spaeny and Jonsson shine. The star of “ Priscilla ” gives a very physical turn, allowing us to feel Rain’s terror in subtle ways. She never resorts to histrionics, playing Rain like a person who has been forced to “get the job done” before and will do so again today. While Spaeny’s work is likely to be underrated, people will almost certainly respond to the excellent turn by Jonsson, an actor who knows how to use his expressive face to maximum effect. Again, Andy has arguably the most notable arc here, and Jonsson nails every turn in it.

With all of these great pieces of the “Romulus” puzzle, it’s disappointing how often Alvarez and company felt like they had to go back to what could be called fan service with lines and easter eggs that feel overly calculated for our referential culture of late. One major connection to the first film that I won’t spoil but will almost certainly be mocked on social media by the end of the weekend is a wild miscalculation: a bit of janky CGI that looks more like an AI-created character than anything tactile. In a film that so clearly values practical effects, it’s jarring to experience a central aspect of it that is so clearly animated. There’s no reason for this. The character could have been rendered differently or at least an animatronic without a level of CGI sheen that makes it look like something out of a Robert Zemeckis mo-cap movie.

The first “Alien” is notoriously known as a haunted house movie in space. It’s a single location with an alien instead of a ghost. At its best, “Alien: Romulus” understands this, seeking to replicate all of the ingredients that go into this time-tested formula. We want to feel as trapped as the characters in a haunted house or on a spaceship, wondering how they could possibly escape a nightmare that’s growing in intensity with each passing minute. And we do through most of the film. Honestly, it’s so artistically connected to the films that came before in terms of its top-notch production quality that I think that’s what makes the blatant callbacks more frustrating. It doesn’t need them to be an “Alien” movie, maybe even the one people have wanted for almost four decades.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film Credits

Alien: Romulus (2024)

119 minutes

Cailee Spaeny as Rain

David Jonsson as Andy

Archie Renaux as Tyler

Isabela Merced as Kay

Spike Fearn as Bjorn

Aileen Wu as Navarro

Fede Álvarez

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All the ‘Alien’ Movies, Ranked From Worst to Best

Assessing the merits of an “Alien” film requires some unique and sometimes very personal calculus. Even given the equal and undeniable artistic and commercial achievements of the first two installments, you have to factor in what resonates most with you between them — horror or action? And then among the rest, are you looking at intention or execution? A theatrical cut or alternate version? Canonical authenticity or spirited departure? For readers, that invisible process may produce a result that echoes the tag line of “Aliens vs. Predator”: Whoever wins, we lose.

Counting the “vs. Predator” films, “Alien: Romulus” marks the ninth feature in a 45-year franchise, and it seems to presage a xenomorph renaissance, with Noah Hawley’s “Alien: Earth” series coming in the months ahead. As “Romulus” terrifies audiences, Variety ranked the “Alien” films.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

Whether you viewed the “AvP” films as craven IP-mining or glorious multi-franchise wish fulfillment, their contributions to the “Alien” canon were mercifully minor. Even though it ends with the city-leveling explosion of a nuclear weapon, this 2007 film has left the lightest footprint of any chapter. And it’s a good thing: sibling special effects artists the brothers Strause delivered a story that’s not only needlessly cruel (masquerading as irreverently violent) but features underwhelming wall-to-wall CGI, the latter undoubtedly a cost-cutting measure but one that leaves the xenomorphs in particular looking flimsy. Additionally burdened with a subplot seemingly pilfered from any of a dozen teen-oriented CW shows that were popular at the time, “Requiem” substitutes underfed ideas (including a combination alien-predator) for memorable characters or even a single moment of real suspense. — Todd Gilchrist

Alien: Resurrection (1997)

ALIEN: RESURRECTION, Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, 1997, TM & Copyright (c) 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.

Helmed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (“Amelie”), “Alien Resurrection” continues the series trend of hiring strong visualists to direct, but trades the studio-meddling anonymity of David Fincher’s theatrical cut for Joss Whedon’s peak ‘90s slickness. By comparison, the soft reboot delivers more fun than its predecessor, but ends up being a worse film overall. Set 200 years after “Alien 3” and focused on another plot driven by corporate/ military profiteering gone wrong, Whedon’s script revives Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley (this time as a clone infused with alien genetics) for her to help a team of mercenaries escape a space ship, the USM Auriga, that’s been overrun by xenomorphs. Jeunet’s nimble camerawork keeps the story moving at a lively pace, but even if the action sequences (including audiences’ first look at a swimming alien) carry a suspenseful charge, too much of the dialogue feels borrowed from ‘80s and ‘90s action movies — and not good ones — where the hero is obligated to deliver an endless string of punny quips. — Jack Dunn

Alien 3 (1992)

ALIEN 3, the alien, Sigourney Weaver, 1992, TM and Copyright (c)20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.

The chapter that provokes the franchise’s most contentious discourse, “Alien 3” proves an underwhelming swing following the one-two punch of the first two “Alien” films. After quite literally jettisoning Ripley’s fellow “Aliens” survivors — which wouldn’t necessarily be a deal-breaker if it was replaced with something equally intriguing — Fincher drops the series’ heroine on a dismal planet where everyone is a shaven-headed, murderous convict. That should provide plenty of fuel for an “oh no, aliens” story (if only to instill curiosity about who will die next), but after Ripley determines that she’s been impregnated with an alien queen, one meandering scene after another robs her decision of whether or not to kill herself of either basic suspense or deeper emotional meaning. Unfortunately, an assembly cut released on physical media doesn’t improve Fincher’s vision for his feature directorial debut; rather than being glum, it becomes overlong and glum. — JD

Aliens vs. Predator (2004)

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR, 2004, TM & Copyright (c) 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.

Heretical though it might be to rank this film above, well, anything that Fincher has done, Paul W.S. Anderson’s spinoff merges two half-baked mythologies with earnest reverence and a crowd-pleasing efficiency. The franchise first began toying with CGI on “Alien 3,” and Anderson deploys some here, most effectively with the gargantuan alien queen that gets activated after a human expedition uncovers an ancient pyramid built deep beneath the ice in Antarctica. But many more of the film’s sequences than one might expect feel like they were shot practically, and even if Anderson’s notion of a puzzle-box pyramid seems silly, it lends unpredictability and a gratifying if formulaic hero’s journey to Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), a worthy if slightly underdeveloped successor to the mantle of Weaver’s Ripley. Anderson’s all-killer-no-filler approach prevents the film from either dragging or becoming weighted with self-seriousness, delivering a B-movie that’s fun without embedding its tongue as deeply in its cheek as an xenomorph’s. — JD

Alien: Covenant (2017)

“Alien Covenant,” aka “Prometheus 2,” is a beautifully composed interplanetary epic that occasionally defaults to muted 2010s sci-fi but thanks to Ridley Scott knows when to crank its chaotic energy up to 11. Merging the David (Michael Fassbender) mythology of “Prometheus” with a colonization mission that makes a detour to the home planet of the human-creating Engineers, John Logan (“Gladiator”) and Dante Harper’s script overindulges the previous film’s philosophical quandaries but allows Ridley Scott to deliver set pieces with an operatic scope that’s undeniable. It also marks the best use of CGI in bringing the xenomorphs to life, giving their births a fleshy, organic appearance and amplifying the gruesome satisfaction of their adult ferocity and speed. That said, its messy plot fizzles out in favor of a more blood-soaked finale — a good thing in the moment although a disappointment for David fans. But whether or not a third prequel happens, it delivers stellar world-building and savage xenomorph carnage. — JD

Prometheus (2012)

PROMETHEUS, from left: Logan Marshall-Green, Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, 2012. TM & copyright ©20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved/courtesy Everett Collection

Ridley Scott’s return to the “Alien” franchise is just half of a good movie, but that half is so beautiful and extraordinary it overshadows the entirety of lesser chapters like an Engineer does one of their creations. Exploring the origins of mankind itself, Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof create an android in Fassbender’s David who manages to be almost more intriguing than the otherworldly creatures the Prometheus crew are searching for. Unfortunately, chronic stupidity metastasizes among the humans even faster than an extraterrestrial parasite once they touch down on LV-223, leading to a finale that leaves more bad questions lingering afterward than good. Even so, there’s a gnarly sequence involving an automated surgery table that’s not easily forgotten. — TG

Alien: Romulus (2024)

ALIEN: ROMULUS, Cailee Spaeny, 2024. © 20th Century Studios / courtesy Everett Collection

Fede Álvarez attempts to square the circle — or at least right a few wrongs — in the franchise mythology with this not-quite standalone film about a group of young colonists who encounter more than they bargain for while trying to salvage equipment for deep space travel from a derelict facility. If the handsome young cast is too freshly scrubbed to convincingly play motley, mine-dwelling urchins, Álvarez and co-screenwriter Rodo Sayagues (“Don’t Breathe”) pinpoint a halfway point between the technology and pacing of Scott’s 1979 original and James Cameron’s 1986 follow-up with such accuracy that audiences feel instantly transported back to that era. That said, some of its fence-mending efforts work better than others, leading to a climax that becomes unwieldy as it simultaneously folds in prequel business and pays homage to those first two films. But like a bloodier “Star Wars: Rogue One,” Álvarez stands confidently on the shoulders of giants, crafting a thriller that manages to land admiringly within reach of the sci-fi firmament that its classic predecessors installed decades ago. — TG

Aliens (1986)

ALIENS, Sigourney Weaver, 1986, TM and Copyright (c)20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.

One of the greatest sequels ever made in any franchise or genre, Cameron’s film absorbs the visual language and mythology of Ridley Scott’s original and reimagines it not as the same sort of pure horror but a character-driven action movie. Weaver deservedly earned a best actress nomination for playing Ripley, who becomes a badass heroine precisely by embracing her maternal instincts (and femininity) in a way the first film studiously avoided. Not only does it burnish Cameron’s delightfully pathological focus on strong female roles, but the film recognizes the multidimensionality of all of its characters, from Bishop (Lance Henriksen) — repairing the reputation of synthetic humans after Ash’s villainy in “Alien” — down to the seemingly most simplistically-minded Marine. Though not as scary as Scott’s film, each of its set pieces are more thrilling than the last, especially when accompanied by James Horner’s iconic score (there’s a reason it was used for a good 10 years in every movie trailer). Smart, inventive and perfectly paced (sorry, I prefer the theatrical cut), “Aliens” is just as much a masterpiece as “Alien,” only a different kind. — TG

Alien (1979)

ALIEN, the alien monster, 1979. TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Courtesy: Everett Collection.

How many horror films, or sci-fi, qualify as exquisite ? It’s a word that defines Ridley Scott’s “Alien” and few others. Every image is painterly, whether Scott’s photographing the ornate mechanical interiors of the spaceship Nostromo or chronicling the gory, blood-spattered end of a member of the crew. Artist H.R. Giger’s designs of futuristic technology, not to mention the xenomorph itself, not only delivered a nightmarish, biomechanical foundation from which the entire franchise (and dozens of others) has taken inspiration, but re-envisioned a typically lurid genre — horror — as a limitless platform for suspenseful, psychological, even artistic exploration (though let’s not kick a hornet’s nest by calling it “elevated”). Opposite all of that meticulous production design, the film’s thirtysomething cast, led by Weaver with a convincing balance of doubtfulness and grit, gives its dangers a scrappy, blue-collar relatability that makes audiences actually care who’s being killed. And then there’s Scott, presiding over it all with virtuoso precision and thoughtfulness, creating an experience that terrifies and astonishes in equal measure. — TG

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'Jackpot!' Review: John Cena and Awkwafina Go for Broke in Paul Feig’s Action-Comedy

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The Big Picture

In Jackpot! , a new lottery in a dystopian L.A. requires the winner to stay alive until sundown while they are hunted by other ticket holders.
The film blends a dark concept with crass comedy, featuring juvenile sex jokes, pop-culture references, and slapstick action sequences.
Despite the on-paper appealing casting of Awkwafina and John Cena, Jackpot! fails to deliver, offering few laughs and a nonsensical storyline.

In the Prime Video film Jackpot! , the state of California implements a new kind of lottery where the winner makes a life-changing amount of cash, but only if they can stay alive within the borders of Los Angeles until sundown. The twist is that every other ticket holder can still claim the jackpot for themselves if they can manage to kill the winner within that time frame, turning each lotto drawing into a crazed, city-wide manhunt. Set in the 2030s, when the U.S. economy is worse than ever and homeless camps litter the streets, Jackpot! has a logline that sounds like it should come from a new Purge sequel or maybe a low-budget thriller that finally draws John Carpenter out of retirement. Instead, it arrives as a loud, crass, and deeply unfunny comedy courtesy of Bridesmaids and Ghostbusters (2016) director Paul Feig . It's tough to recall another recent example where a filmmaker and his material are so disastrously mismatched , and the end result is catastrophic for everyone involved.

Jackpot! (2024)

Jackpot! revolves around a futuristic "Grand Lottery" in California, where the twist is that the winner must be killed before sundown for the prize to be legally claimed. Katie Kim, who finds herself with the winning ticket and must survive with the help of Noel Cassidy, against various hunters.

What Is 'Jackpot!' About

In Jackpot! , Awkwafina plays Katie Kim , a former child actor who returns to California to have another go at a Hollywood career after her ailing mother, who she had been caring for back in Michigan, passes away. In the first of the film's many senseless contrivances, Katie isn't even aware that the state has a new kind of lottery that activates the bloodlust of nearly all of Los Angeles, so she's completely befuddled when she accidentally activates a ticket she finds in a borrowed piece of clothing, is declared the winner, and suddenly finds herself being attacked by almost every person she comes in contact with. (All assaults are up close and personal as guns are banned by the lottery's rules.) One of the few people not trying to kill her is John Cena 's Noel, a "protection agent" who will work to keep her alive until sundown for a standard 10 percent of her winnings. A very confused Katie is reluctant to accept his offer at first but eventually comes to rely on Noel, especially once a bigger, shadier, and much more corporate protection agency, led by an old military buddy of Noel's played by Simu Liu , is drawn into their mad scramble for riches.

Based on that summation, you might assume that Jackpot! turns into a bloody gorefest, but you'd be wrong. The movie states its intentions in the first few moments, when the on-screen text that establishes the film's universe and rules ends with: "Some people call it dystopian. But those people are no fun." Working from a script by Rob Yescombe , Feig severely downplays the violent implications of the story to instead tell a light Hollywood satire stuffed with jokes that range from terrible (there's a character who's a deejay named DJ) to a lifeforce-draining level of dreadful. At one point, Machine Gun Kelly , seemingly just playing his current-day self even though the movie is set at least six years into the future, mistakenly thinks Cena wants to have sex with him and says, "You would turn my asshole into the Eye of Sauron . So let’s not go on that fellowship of my ring."

An end-of-movie blooper reel reveals that other equally bad options were considered for that retort, while also proving that you can't get away from Jackpot! 's juvenile sex jokes even once you've suffered through to the credits . Additionally, there are fart jokes, shart jokes, the insinuation that two supporting characters had sex with a wax recreation of The Wizard of Oz 's Tinman, and a lame, recurring bit about how Cena's character is unreasonably obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles . If this is what counts for "fun," I'll happily trade it back in for a standard-issue, gloomy dystopia, please.

'Jackpot!' Is Frustrating and Annoying in Equal Measure

Almost every aspect of Jackpot! feels like a misfire , either for tonal or story-based reasons. Why a lottery that includes the attempted murder of the winner proves to be a bigger money-maker than the regular lottery is never addressed. And while I don't disagree that culture has stagnated, it's weird to see a movie supposedly set in a more hellish near future continually dropping lazy pop-culture references. (In addition to the TMNT thing and Machine Gun Kelly being around, there are shoutouts to Star Wars , The Karate Kid , the Kardashians , and more.) It's genuinely mystifying. Even worse, it's annoying. Early on in the movie, Katie is forced to deal with a ditzy Airbnb renter named Shadi ( Ayden Mayeri ), who quickly makes a strong case for being the most irritating and unwelcome character in a film this year. Cena and Liu, the latter of whom must be desperately waiting for Marvel to get him back on the schedule , end up in a screaming match about LaCroix sparkling water at one point.

Things aren't much better on the "action" side of this action-comedy . Again, it's a story choice to have the film's events play out as silly instead of violent. Because the Lottery commission has drones that follow Katie around and report her location at regular intervals, she and Noel are constantly under attack by young punks, wannabe actors, no-so-kindly grandmas, and anyone else who's within grabbing distance of a knife or hatchet. However, Katie and Noel, two people the movie continually insists are among the few "good people" left in a world gone mad, refuse to respond in kind, typically disarming and incapacitating their foes as pleasantly as possible. (At one point, Cena puts a helmet on an attacker before tossing them out of their moving vehicle because he doesn't want them to sustain a head injury.) Katie is surprisingly effective at fending off hordes of greedy maniacs, although the movie's explanation that it's because she once took a stunt-fighting class feels, like everything else, exceedingly flimsy. The fights themselves are slap-sticky, the kind of throwdowns you'd see in a Jackie Chan film but without someone as skilled as Chan gracefully centering the action and holding the frame.

The film's ideas about the struggle to remain a good person when times are bad and how the government will play us all against each other for its own gain are so simple, basic, and noncommittal that no real thematic throughline is ever able to emerge as a result. Jackpot! could be looked at as an allegory for fame and instant stardom — all the people trying to kill Katie to claim the jackpot are labeled as her "fans," and Katie's face is suddenly on every screen in the city — but that feels inconsequential and unprobed as well, probably because the filmmakers were more concerned about fitting in another couple of butthole jokes.

All of this is to say Awkwafina and Cena have both done far better work elsewhere . There are exactly two jokes here that got me to faintly smile. The first is when Awkwafina tells Cena he looks like "a bulldog that a witch cast a spell on and turned into a human against his will." Pretty accurate that. And, then, near the end of the movie, Awkwafina makes a crack about acting being a worthless endeavor as "fucking wrestlers and YouTubers are movie stars now." It's an easy joke about her and Cena's more humble origins, and it's likely less clever than the best joke from any randomly selected Deadpool scene . But, considering the laugh-free, 90-plus minutes that preceded it, this moderately amusing, self-referential crack felt like discovering an oasis after spending ages lost in the desert. The movie might be called Jackpot! , but no one is leaving this one a winner.

The action-comedy 'Jackpot!' attempts to blend a dystopian concept with a slapstick comic style, and the end result is disastrous.

Pros? Uhh ... err ... well ...
The combination of dystopian thriller and Paul Feig's brand of improv-heavy comedy make for an awkward fit.
The near-future world established in 'Jackpot!' doesn't make a lick of sense.
Awkwafina and John Cena can be incredibly appealing performers. But you're going to have to look elsewhere to see it.

Jackpot! is available to stream on Prime Video in the U.S. starting August 15.

WATCH ON PRIME VIDEO

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Alien: Romulus review: This 'clever, gripping and sometimes awe-inspiring' chiller is the best Alien film in decades

Since the first two films in the 1980s, the sci-fi horror series has been a very mixed bag. But this latest gets back to basics, and makes for a superbly scary monster movie.

There have already been eight Alien films, including the two Alien vs Predator spin-offs, but if you add up the Alien films which are genuinely good, that number gets much, much smaller. The series is notorious for sequels and prequels that were compromised by personality clashes and studio interference, and even the last two, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant , ended up being derivative and pretentious muddles, despite being made by the director of the peerless 1979 original, Ridley Scott.

Now, though, the total of genuinely good Alien films has gone up by one. Fede Álvarez, the Uruguayan director of Don't Breathe and 2013's remake of The Evil Dead, has triumphed with a clever, gripping and sometimes awe-inspiring sci-fi chiller, which takes the series back to its nerve-racking monster-movie roots while injecting it with some new blood – some new acid blood, you might say.

He has set Alien: Romulus between the events of Scott's Alien and James Cameron's Aliens, and he takes care to recreate the retro-futuristic atmosphere of those films. In particular, he sticks to their weathered industrial aesthetic, with its low lighting, its jets of steam and its scratched and dented machinery, most of which gets jammed so often that it's amazing anyone from Earth ever made it past the Moon. He also brings back the rumblings of anti-corporate sentiment, and uses characters who seem like ordinary people rather than pre-ordained action heroes, while he and his co-writer, Rodo Sayagues, have fashioned a fast-moving, sort-of logical plot that is refreshingly short of the "why are those idiots doing that?" moments that spoilt Prometheus and Covenant. Wisely, he doesn't attempt to shoehorn in Sigourney Weaver, although a surprise guest appearance by someone who appeared in an early Alien film will delight some fans of the series while upsetting others.

The main characters are a group of twentysomething colonists who are stuck in dead-end mining jobs on a grey and grimy planet that never has any sunlight. The actors include Archie Renaux, Isabella Merced, Aileen Wu and Spike Fearn, but the only characters anyone will care about are the orphaned Rain, played with steely grace by Cailee Spaeny ( Priscilla ), and her awkward adoptive brother Andy, played with exquisite nuance by David Jonsson (Rye Lane). These downtrodden workers have to labour away for years before they are eventually allowed to travel to the verdant planet Rain has been dreaming of, but one of them has a better idea. They have detected an abandoned spaceship in orbit just above them, so if they can fly up to it in their own shuttle craft, they should be able to salvage its cryogenic pods, put themselves into suspended animation and zoom off to their dreamworld before the colony's authorities catch up with them.

ALIEN: ROMULUS

Director: Fede Álvarez

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, Maya Hawke, Archie Renaux, Isabella Merced

Run time: 1hr 59m

After setting off, the first thing these young rebels discover is that the abandoned spaceship is actually a space station. The second thing they discover is that it's abandoned because, you guessed it, its crew was wiped out by spiky-tailed, long-clawed, cucumber-headed xenomorphs. Soon it will be Rain's turn to be chased along metal corridors by these monsters, but that's not her only problem. There are fuel supplies and law-enforcement officials to worry about, and the space station is drifting towards an asteroid belt which will rip it to shreds in a matter of hours. As in all the best ticking-clock thrillers, the characters have a limited amount of time to complete their mission, and then that time suddenly gets a lot more limited.

It feels like a missed opportunity not to have the creatures wreaking havoc in the colony itself, considering how expansive and detailed that dingy setting is. But Alien: Romulus delivers the goods as a creepy haunted-house-in-space film with some crafty twists, hold-your-breath suspense and popcorn-dropping scares. Relying on practical rather than digital effects, Álvarez makes the xenomorphs as nightmarish as they ever have been. He is sensible enough to keep them hidden for most of the running time, skilfully building tension with muffled clangs and glimpsed silhouettes, but whenever the monsters do emerge from the shadows, he makes repulsive use of the icky slime and squelchy, birth-related imagery which have become the series' trademarks.

In fact, my main complaint about Alien: Romulus is that the aliens aren't in it enough. Determined to pay loving homage to several of the franchise's previous films, Álvarez can't resist dropping in concepts and plot strands from all over the series, and, among all those, the iconic xenomorphs are slightly under-used. It's also easy to lose track of which characters are still alive, which spacecraft they're in, and what the rules are concerning room temperature and artificial gravity. The stripped-back simplicity of Scott's first Alien film still hasn't been matched by any of its successors, whether or not they're directed by Scott himself.

Alien: Romulus beats most of the competition, though. Bloated by two or three elements too many, it isn't a "perfect organism", to use the phrase coined by Ian Holm's android character in Alien, but it's as close to perfect as any entry in the series since Aliens in 1986.

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COMMENTS

Don't Look Up movie review & film summary (2021)
Roger Ebert gives a harsh critique of Adam McKay's Netflix comedy "Don't Look Up", starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. He calls it a disastrous, anti-provocative, and hollow film that wastes its star power and potential.
'Don't Look Up' Review: Tick, Tick, Kablooey
Directed by Adam McKay. Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi. R. 2h 18m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Movies love ...
Don't Look Up (2021)
The film suffers in that the human moments aren't nearly human enough. Jul 18, 2024. ["Don't Look Up"] accurately depicts how sensationalism today can stoke panic, fear, and mistrust among the ...
Don't Look Up (2021)
Don't Look Up: Directed by Adam McKay. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett. Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn humankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.
'Don't Look Up' Review: Adam McKay's Apocalyptic Comet Comedy
The plot of "Don't Look Up" is intricate enough that McKay would have done well to rein in the improv, rather than letting everyone "American Hustle" their way through scenes (only ...
Don't Look Up
Zoë Rose Bryant Loud and Clear Reviews. Don't Look Up calls out institutional indifference to impending disaster with relatable and riveting rage thanks to a scorching script and engaged ...
Don't Look Up Review
IGN's Samantha Nelson reviews Don't Look Up, a dark comedy about a comet threatening to destroy Earth. She praises the cast and the satire, but criticizes the direction and the length.
Don't Look Up Review
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. People:
'Don't Look Up' Review
An all-star cast that also includes Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep faces the end of the world in Netflix's satire of climate crisis and ...
Don't Look Up
Dec 8, 2021. A film with all the right things to say about how government, the media, and corporations ignore the emerging disaster of climate change, but couched within a satire so lumbering that it's enough to turn a tree hugger into a pro-fracker. Read More. By Alonso Duralde FULL REVIEW. See All 52 Critic Reviews.
Don't Look Up
At its best, "Don't Look Up" trades in the global chaos for small surprises of tenderness. It's baffling, then, that McKay bypasses these moments so often in favor of cramming in a few more one-off gags, a few more cameos. ... I began writing biweekly movie reviews for The Harvard Press, an independently published newspaper, in 2010 ...
Don't Look Up First Reviews: Armageddon With a Brain
Don't Look Up is a better movie than those of that ilk. - Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic. The film is the ultimate disaster movie, timely in its subject matter and ambitious in its execution. - Mae Abdulbaki, Screen Rant. Don't Look Up is essentially Deep Impact played for yuks, Armageddon if it had a brain. - Ian Freer, Empire ...
'Don't Look Up' delivers a punch in comet-themed climate change film
Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) portrays the perils of Ph.D. dissertations in the comet-themed "Don't Look Up." (Image credit: Netflix) (Image credit: Netflix) Orlean gives a despairing and ...
Don't Look Up review: Netflix comedy is an emotional ride through the
The Verge's Andrew Webster praises the film's cast, humor, and realism, but warns that it's not a lighthearted fun. He compares it to the pandemic and says it's a cathartic reflection of our reality.
Don't Look Up review: The sky is falling in Adam McKay's starry, silly
review: The sky is falling in Adam McKay's starry, silly disaster flick. The world ends not with a bang, but a DiCaprio. Adam McKay has made a rich career out of satire — an equal-opportunity ...
'Don't Look Up' movie review: In Adam McKay?s latest satire, a planet
"Don't Look Up" exemplifies a vanishing breed in mainstream cinema: the Great American One-Off, a movie designed not as a sequel, brand-extender or franchise-builder (or launchpad for same ...
Don't Look Up review: Netflix star-studded satire is ...
Don't Look Up is a hellishly unfunny ride through The Discourse. Joshua Rivera (he/him) is an entertainment and culture journalist specializing in film, TV, and video game criticism, the latest ...
'Don't Look Up' review: Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence
In a grand science fiction tradition, "Don't Look Up" uses a disaster-movie framework as a metaphor for a reality-based crisis, with a huge comet hurtling toward Earth as a surrogate for ...
'Don't Look Up' review: Scattershot Netflix satire
McKay and Sirota, a journalist and former advisor/speechwriter for the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, serve up a smorgasbord of satirical jabs plucked from the political detritus of the past four ...
The Crude Demagogy of "Don't Look Up"
January 6, 2022. The film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, tells the story of the discovery of an apocalyptic comet that's heading for Earth. Photograph by Niko Tavernise ...
'Don't Look Up' Review: Get Ready to Root for the Comet
Reviews. By Matt Goldberg. Published Dec 8, ... The 10 Worst Drama Movies of All Time, According to Roger Ebert ... His latest film, Don't Look Up, makes all of its points about America's ills ...
Don't Look Up
Don't Look Up is a 2021 American apocalyptic political satire black comedy film written, co-produced, and directed by Adam McKay from a story he co-wrote with David Sirota. [1] It stars an ensemble cast featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Kid Cudi, Cate Blanchett, and Meryl Streep.
'Don't Look Up' review: Broad humor undermines satire about a country
A pair of shallow TV hosts (Cate Blanchett, left, and Tyler Perry) miss the urgent points being made by astronomers Randall (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate (Jennifer Lawrence) in "Don't Look Up ...
20 of Roger Ebert's Most Hated Zero-Star Reviews
Not one to hold back when a movie was truly god-awful, Roger Ebert "hated, hated, hated" movies like Caligula, Dirty Love, and Freddy Got Fingered.
Alien: Romulus movie review & film summary (2024)
When Ridley Scott released "Prometheus" and "Alien: Covenant," the main criticism levied against them essentially boiled down to that they didn't provide the same kind of sci-fi thrills as "Alien" and "Aliens," two of the most beloved films of all time.Anyone who dislikes those films because they have too much philosophy and not enough acidic alien spit will be satisfied by ...
'Alien' Movies, Ranked From Worst to Best
Helmed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Amelie"), "Alien Resurrection" continues the series trend of hiring strong visualists to direct, but trades the studio-meddling anonymity of David Fincher ...
'Jackpot!' Review
Please verify your email address. You've reached your account maximum for followed topics. In the Prime Video film Jackpot!, the state of California implements a new kind of lottery where the ...
Alien: Romulus review: This 'clever, gripping and sometimes awe ...
Now, though, the total of genuinely good Alien films has gone up by one. Fede Álvarez, the Uruguayan director of Don't Breathe and 2013's remake of The Evil Dead, has triumphed with a clever ...

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