Has anyone ever heard of Disruption Dismemberment? To be honest, I thought it was something else at first, that being drawn and quartered.
But drawn and quartered is shorthand for being hung, drawn and quartered. Its a medieval execution method that involves being drawn by horse to the site of the execution, hung until almost dead, emasculated, eviscerated, decapitated, and finally extremities are lopped off to be quartered. Its a particularly brutal method of execution, usually saved for those guilty of high treason to the crown in Britain, the most serious of all offenses.
Disruption dismemberment is quite different, but the quartering is similar. The victim has all four limbs tied to horses, which are all encouraged to walk in opposite directions, to ultimately pull the victim apart, limb from limb.
So the victim would be in the middle, being pulled in all directions and going nowhere. And an issue was that it sometimes wouldn’t work. There have been records of the ordeal lasting upwards of four hours. The execution, being overlong and tedious would be mercifully cut short by the executioner hacking off the limbs in a more traditional way.
Wait a minute. Painful? Going nowhere? Overlong? Tedious? Why that sounds like…
Don’t Look Up
Okay, that is a little harsh to Don’t Look Up, but it is what I thought about while watching it.
Part political satire farce, and part serious depressing drama, Don’t Look Up tells the story of a planet-killing comet aimed directly at Earth, the scientists who discover it, and the rest of the world who are either too greedy or too stupid to do anything about it.
Comparing it to a medieval form of execution is too harsh, but I have my reasons. There are disparate parts of this movie that do work. Standouts Meryl Streep and Jonah Hill as President Orlean and her chief-of-staff/son are hilarious, and it is nice to see characters like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Professor Mindy and Jennifer Lawrence’s Kate Dibiasky reacting to the oncoming apocalypse by hyperventalating and crying in every other scene.
The problem, as you may have noticed, is that these things are on the complete opposite spectrum, and actively harm each other from getting anything done.
Horsepower
The goal of a movie is to accomplish something. It can be to make the audience think of something critically, or simply to entertain. But everything has to be working together in order to go anywhere.
For example, Logan is a movie about the death of what is to many a beloved character. The movie is filled with bleak ruminations on life and death and punctuated with bouts of extreme, bloody violence.
What makes it work is that the two compliment each other. The depiction of death and pain in the story gives weight to the violence.
It could also be as simple as Die Hard. Die Hard isn’t trying to say or do anything other than entertain. And it does that using comedy and action.
It works because the action isn’t serious enough to make the comedy feel out of place, and the comedy is grounded enough so that the action doesn’t feel too toothless. That’s why when John McClane jumps off the building with a fire hose tied around himself, you aren’t thinking about how ridiculous and unrealistic it is. Or when the FBI agents are blown up in a helicopter, you aren’t sad about their brutal deaths, you’re laughing at “We’re gonna need more FBI guys.” Everything works together to just be damn entertaining.
Because multiple horses work best if they are all pulling in the same direction. But if the horses are pulling in opposite directions, it goes nowhere.
Going Nowhere, Fast
So why does Don’t Look Up not really work, despite all the parts being at least competent?
Well, its clear that we are meant to connect to and care about Dr. Mindy, Kate and Dr. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan). Their storyline and characters are the most serious, and there aren’t many jokes between them, outside of a running gag of a Colonel making Kate pay for snacks at the White House that she later learns are free.
However, President Orlean and the political storyline is just a complete farce. That alone isn’t a problem, because there has to be something to differentiate Don’t Look Up from Melancholia. Melancholia is a 2011 movie made by Lars von Trier before his head disappeared completely up his own ass and depicts a planet named Melancholia that seems to be on a crash course with the Earth. It is a dark and serious drama exploring depression and the human reaction to incoming catastrophe.
So Don’t Look Up probably couldn’t be played straight for fear of comparison to Melancholia, and therefor its good to be played as a farce, like with the way it handles the United States government. But the two storylines are too far apart to exist cohesively in the same work and still carry the same weight.
The dinner scene at the end of the movie had potential to be a heart-rending scene, but it is hard, if just subconsciously, to understand what the movie is going for. President Orlean and her son are cartoonish in their depiction, and is therefor it is completely impossible to care for them. When Orlean is trying to escape the planet near the end of the film and it is revealed she left her son behind, you aren’t sad that he is facing certain death, its funny that he is completely forgotten.
Its too big of a disconnect. One half of the story is trying to make you care about the world that the film has made, and the other half openly states that you shouldn’t. Which is it?
One Perfectly Imperfect Scene
There is one scene where this problem is exemplified perfectly.
The first attempt to deflect the comet is called off because Peter Isherwell (played by Mark Rylance playing Steve Jobs), tech magnate that is one of the three richest men ever, finds out that the comet carries valuable resources that can be used to create phones and computers etc. Think of his company as Apple, Google and Microsoft all rolled into one.
So, his company creates these robots to drop bombs in the comet a la Armageddon and break it up to smaller, less harmful chunks that will strike the Earth, not destroy it, and make Isherwell even more rich. He does this with the help of the US government, but Prof. Mindy, who has begun working with the government, starts to become wary of the lack of peer revision in the science used by Isherwell.
When Prof. Mindy confronts Isherwell, an interaction occurs that is pretty hard to read. Isherwell claims that his company has so much information on Prof. Mindy that he knows that Mindy has colon polyps before even his doctor knows.
That’s meant to be comedic, right? I guess. Its hyperbolic to the extreme, and a play on how much tech companies know about us in the real world. And also haha, colon anus funny.
But then Isherwell continues to say that they can predict a person’s death to about 97% accuracy, and that Prof. Mindy’s death is so mundane and forgetable that Isherwell has totally forgotten it.
Is that a joke? It is hyperbolic and silly to think that a company could predict someone’s death to that certainty when there are things like car accidents and acts of God that cannot be predicted at all that factor into someone’s death. And this concept is used as a joke later in the movie when it comes to President Orlean’s death.
But we are supposed to care about Prof. Mindy, and the concept of death being so mundane, and the ending of life being so meaningless, is not really funny. Its a sort of existential dread that goes hand in hand with a comet wiping out all living things on Earth. Except that for every single other second of the film, Isherwell is a joke. He is a parody of the Steve Jobses and Elon Musks of the world, and its really really hard to feel threatened by a parody. But at the same time, its not a joke.
Whatever the intention of the scene is, its muddled through this confusion of tones and mixing of emotions in the most extreme way, and everything loses its power.
A Formula Broken
This movie is written and directed by Adam McKay, best known in his early years by his comedies with Will Ferrell such as Step Brothers and Anchorman, but has since moved into these snappy, quick-witted comedy-dramas with The Big Short and Vice.
Don’t Look Up on the surface resembles The Big Short and Vice in tone and genre. The Big Short has an almost Scorsese-esque pace covering a long period of time with a lot of characters. The pacing is slower in Don’t Look Up, as it covers a lot less ground in time and characters, and the dialogue is a lot less snappy and witty.
Compared to Don’t Look Up, The Big Short’s story about the housing collapse is such a light concept, and therefor the bridge between the comedy and drama is less wide. The housing drama is a real thing that we lived through and we came out okay, so its not that sad. The human race being extinguished totally is really depressing, and trying to bridge the gap is just too wide to do well.
And mankind is doomed at the end of the film. Make no mistake, Orlean’s son survives after the impact, but immediately starts to video himself to all the dead people on Earth. Its clear from that ending that Adam McKay believes we will never learn from what doomed us, and we are destined for destruction. But why are we?
Pulled Apart, In More Ways Than One
What is the reason that mankind is doomed in Don’t Look Up? There are a myriad of reasons and issues that are attempted to be lambasted in Don’t Look Up. There’s the mainstream media, politics in general, the internet hate mob and hashtag activism, celebrity culture, tech conglomerates and the information they have on the public.
The problem is that McKay either has nothing to say about them, or doesn’t want to risk offending with his opinion. President Orlean is not named as a Republican or Democrat, and McKay has deflected the question when asked in interviews. In extended montages showing the internet’s reactions to major events in the film, text and images fly by too fast to comprehend or to say anything cohesive.
This film is like pointing out flaws without giving any reason behind them, or how they can be fixed. Its depressing. The initial announcement of the comet is overshadowed by a pop starlet’s announcement of her engagement to a DJ. The president calls off a world saving mission because a rich guy told her to. Talk show hosts are incapable of taking the news of impending doom seriously.
These are all issues that are serious enough to make statements on, but McKay either refuses to say anything on the subjects other than that they exist, or he has nothing to say about them. There’s too much happening too fast for anything to stick.
The political stuff is really quite funny, and if the film focused more on that, made the satire more biting and specific, and just kept Prof. Mindy or Kate as someone to react to the ridiculous events taking place.
Narrow the focus and really bite into the meat of one issue, line up all the horses in one direction, and you will go places. But this movie has too many horses pulling in too many directions to go anywhere. Its a bunch of sound and fury and it signifies nothing. It is funny at times, looks good and is well acted, but it still remains nothing and goes nowhere.
The Sensations of Storytelling 