With a star-studded cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Timothée Chalamet, the movie Don’t Look Up sure has a lot.

The 2021 comedy-disaster film, directed by Adam McKay, has a lot of famous actors, a lot of political humor and a lot of run time. 

Two hours and 25 minutes to be exact.

The movie follows two astronomers (DiCaprio, Lawrence) who have discovered an incoming comet large enough to end all life on Earth on impact, and it’s only six months away. When they try to alert the president (Meryl Streep) and the public, it turns out that no one cares, or happens to see the severity of the problem. 

While it is full of many things, something Don’t Look Up is missing is subtlety. It has a lot of political commentaries that are shoved down your throat, and its commentary on the U.S. government is funny at first but excessive in the end.

Don’t Look Up comes off as a movie that thinks it is clever and smart when it rarely is. That doesn’t make it bad, but it’s nothing new. Most of the jokes faced at the government could have been written by anybody and don’t seem original. Its ending is also very predictable by the end of the first act. Without spoiling anything, it just feels like the writers knew the outcome of the movie before they finished writing the rest of it, so what leads up to it seems forced.

The best part of Don’t Look Up is its cast,. Most of the movie follows the two main astronomers and their respective love interests, so the insane amount of big actors are mostly used as bit parts. One of the funniest parts of this movie is the fact that some of the most well-known actors in the world are only part of this movie for about two minutes, or their only purpose is to crack a couple of jokes.

Don’t Look Up was made near the end of 2020, which means it was affected by the pandemic. Not in the way it was filmed or released, but in its writing. It’s pretty hard to miss the several references to COVID-19, with the asteroid being the virus, the astronomers being doctors, and the public being the public.

If not explicitly mimicking the pandemic, it is very much about collective denial and how some people just won’t accept the facts. 

Don’t Look Up is not a bad movie. It has some flaws with subtlety, and it isn’t anything we haven’t seen before, but at least it’s fun. It isn’t as deep as it tries to be, and the political commentary usually doesn’t work for me.

But it has a lot of good parts too, with many funny scenes and jokes that work well. I would recommend this movie if you are looking for something to watch that you can just put on and not think much about it. I probably wouldn’t watch it again but I wouldn’t steer others away from their first watch.

I rate Don’t Look Up a 7/10.