Don't Look Up: I see what you were trying to do there...

[This post contains spoilers, to a degree.]

Talk about a curate's egg (good in parts) of a movie:  the much discussed Don't Look Up on Netflix.  

On the upside:

* all of the actors are really good, and I thought that Mark Rylands as the self involved tech billionaire was excellent.  He's the sort of actor who seems to inhabit roles, rather than act them.

*  some of the satire of Trumpian politics worked well - especially the dumb son as Chief of Staff.  Meryl Streep herself wasn't bad, but the role as written was ambiguous - you never really could tell if she was just dumb, like Trump; or smart but just so self-involved as to be dangerous.

* sure, I get the overall intention of a satire where the political opportunism and media messaging (and tech's manipulation of what interests in the public) is more important than the actual information;  but for broad satire to work it has to feel a tad more credible to me.

On the downside:

*  I think there are two key problems - the first being that the screenplay seemed to bend over backwards to avoid the risk of characters being identified exactly with any living person or institution.   So, for example, the Trump-ian President is shown getting a hug from Bill Clinton in a photo - is that just there so the writer can say "see, I'm not saying she's necessarily a Republican"?   The tech billionaire - you got a sense he was designed to vaguely remind us of Steve Jobs, but a dumber version. (That guy's dead, so defamation wouldn't have been a problem if the character was more like him.  It would have upset Apple fanboys, however.)   We all know that the worst tech billionaire is probably Zuckerberg, but the character as written was not given any of his obvious features (in terms of age or terrible haircut), so it seems to me it was again "playing it safe".   And the terrible morning TV show - surely Fox News should be the target, but they took a fair amount of care to make it something more generic.  If I worked on one of the mainstream morning breakfast shows in the US, I would be a bit insulted by this aspect, actually.   

* The second problem - is it too much to ask of satire to be more scientifically accurate?    I think - without looking it up - that the chances of a comet being found to have valuable minerals is next to nil.  An asteroid - sure - but if the movie had gone with that, they wouldn't have had the ability to make the joke that the disaster was literally staring the idiot part of humanity in the face.   (Also, I suspect in real life, the comet would have been obvious in the sky earlier than it was in the film.)   I didn't care for the silliness of the plan to cut up the comet, either.   And really, very popular disaster films have made the public (and even media stars) aware of what the end of the world by giant meteor or asteroid strike would look like - it's just not really credible to have this news immediately downplayed on virtually any media network - even (dare I say it) Fox News.

I suspect that a more realistic scenario would have worked better as satire - say, that it was an asteroid, and that the problem turned out to be an ageing, libertarian inclined astronomer with Republican connections coming up with his own calculation that it was only a 50% chance of it hitting - not the 99% chance that NASA gave.  (Or he could calculate that it would hit the North Pole and not really endanger the planet - just some unfortunate Russian Northern cities that can be evacuated.)    And the President and her party runs with the contrarian advice...

It wouldn't be as broad a satire, but that would (in my opinion) be a good thing.