Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up hands us a comet that will wipe out civilization in about six months, then watches a distracted world shrug. Everything the film argues, it argues through that shrug. McKay wrote it from a story he co-wrote with David Sirota, and he uses the impact as an allegory for the climate crisis. The film also reads, almost scene by scene, as a comment on how societies treated science during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The setup is simple. Kate Dibiasky, a doctoral candidate played by Jennifer Lawrence, finds the comet. Her adviser, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), runs the numbers. Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), who heads the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, confirms them and walks the pair into the White House. There they meet President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her son and chief of staff Jason (Jonah Hill), and nobody is alarmed. The Guardian describes the comet as Mount Everest-sized and hears echoes of Dr Strangelove, Network and Wag the Dog in the knockabout tone.

Those are grand names to be filed beside, and the Guardian does not offer them as a compliment. It calls the film a laboured, self-conscious, unrelaxed satire, “like a 145-minute Saturday Night Live sketch,” without the comedy of Succession, which McKay co-produces. Variety is harsher still: a “smug, easy-target political satire” whose big insight is that humans are stupid. Both reviews name a real weakness, and both, to my eye, miss what the film does with it. The targets are easy, yes. But the ease is the point. When the danger is plain and the response is a shrug, subtlety would be a kind of lie.

The film is at its best where the comedy stays close to the dread. Screen Rant singles out a running gag about a government official lying about giving things away for free, and argues that the film parallels reality so closely that even its funniest moments turn chilling. The same review says unease runs under every laugh and that the farce never overshadows the bleak mess the characters face. That matches what I felt. The laughs stick in the throat because the situation they describe is not far from the news.

The opening act is the most startling stretch, and the Guardian notes that it rests on fact. Deflecting an incoming asteroid by launching missiles at it really is official US government policy, and Werner Herzog made the same observation in his documentary Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds. Seen that way, the absurdity of the early scenes is not exaggeration. McKay needs only to show the machinery turning slowly while the clock runs.

The cast is the film’s loudest selling point. Roger Ebert’s site says that if Don’t Look Up deserves any award, it is for casting director Francine Maisler, and the line is half a joke and half exact. The Guardian describes DiCaprio’s Mindy as a nerdy, bearded astronomer, nervous of human interaction and addicted to Xanax. Variety sees Lawrence’s Dibiasky with a nose ring and hair the colour of red velvet cake. Film Probe calls her the standout, with a warmth and relatability that make her “the only character who felt truly real.” The same review finds DiCaprio strong but overshadowed by his strange, quirky character choices. I read those choices differently: an anxious, awkward scientist is exactly who the story needs at the centre, a decent man whose caution counts for nothing in a media landscape that rewards confidence.

Streep is the other pole. The Guardian calls President Orlean a panto villain, and Variety says she is “clearly having more fun than we are.” Both are right, and neither is a complaint I share. A president who treats extinction as a scheduling problem has to be played big. Hill is the son who also holds the chief-of-staff job, or, in Screen Rant’s words, her incompetent son. That pairing is a plain joke about family and power, and the film never pretends it is anything more.

The media is the second target, and a sharper one. Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry play the hosts Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer, whom Variety dismisses as “bobblehead media.” When the hosts treat the topic flippantly, Dibiasky loses her temper, rants about the threat and leaves, and public reaction is muted. Variety quotes the advice a producer gives the scientists before they appear on The Daily Rip: “Keep it light, fun.” The sky is falling, and the format asks for a smile. That contrast is what makes the scene hard to sit through. Mark Rylance plays the tech mogul Sir Peter Isherwell, whom the Guardian calls a creepy Brit, and with him the film adds big tech to its list of targets. In that review’s phrase, the interests of big tech insidiously paralyse the response.

Film Probe supplies a useful correction to the pile of complaints. Its critic first found the film high-brow, condescending and heavy-handed, then changed their mind on a second viewing and judged it intelligent and extremely politically charged. The same writer wishes McKay had cut some of the overused star cameos, and I agree. The long cast list, which runs on to Timothée Chalamet as Yule, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi, sometimes feels like a roll call. Even so, Film Probe says Chalamet, who looked like the most ridiculous addition, became likeable on a second look.

The flaws are not hard to find. The piling up of targets can feel like a list of grievances rather than a story, and the film seldom lets a scene breathe. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus puts it fairly: the film aims too high for its scattershot barbs to land consistently, yet it hits its target of collective denial square on. Never Think Impossible adds an objection from the other side, that the film never does justice to the scientific community either.

The film’s history explains some of its tone. It was announced in November 2019 and was first set for theatrical release by Paramount before Netflix took the rights. Lawrence joined first, DiCaprio signed after talking through script changes with McKay, and the rest of the cast was added through 2020. Filming was meant to start in April 2020 in Massachusetts, but the pandemic pushed it to November, and it wrapped in February 2021. The film opened in a limited run on December 10, 2021, and reached Netflix on December 24, where it set a record for viewing hours in a single week and became the second most-watched film on the service within 28 days.

Critics split. Donna Lu of the Guardian wrote that it “received a frosty reception from many film critics” while climate activists thoroughly lauded it. The institutions were kinder. It was named a top-ten film of 2021 by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute, earned four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and won the Writers Guild award for Best Original Screenplay.

I come down in favour, with reservations. Don’t Look Up shouts where a quieter film would have whispered. Yet its best moments work just as the Guardian and Screen Rant describe them: the producer’s “Keep it light, fun” before The Daily Rip, and Lawrence’s Dibiasky, the one character Film Probe found truly real, losing her temper at the hosts. They carry the picture past its bluntness and its crowded cast list. It is also a comedy about the climate crisis that a very large audience sat down and watched, which counts for something.