Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Happy Endings, or Not

As the year winds down, it’s probably a good time to catch up on the entertainment options, but I wouldn’t know about that. Whenever I find myself lurching from Netflix to Amazon Prime and YouTube TV, I’m usually looking for something elusive — something to deflect the loneliness and despair, the unwanted solitude.

So when I spotted a new disaster film the other night, it seemed like a good bet. 

“Don’t Look Up” with Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and friends is a Netflix film about the end of the world, in this case from a collision with a meteor. 

Such stories follow one of two tracks — either disaster is averted, presumably by a hero, or not. Often, impending disaster arrives from space, as opposed to bat viruses. In the space kind of world-ending scenarios, only so many options exist and “Star Trek” explored most of them decades ago. 

Thus, there is one scene in “Don’t Look Up” reminiscent of another of Lawrence’s films, “Passengers,” where space travelers from Earth wake up in space pods traveling to a distant world; otherwise the two films share little in common.

That life as we know it can end due to a meteor is, of course, a relatively recent realization for most of humanity, but astronomers have known this for ages. Plus, in 2013 NASA told Congress it would need at least five years to prepare for such an event by developing the capacity to blow the offending boulder off-track with nukes.

But in this movie, by the time the post-doc student Jennifer detects the asteroid, NASA has just six months to defend civilization from total and complete destruction.

Actually, this cinematic tale is not about the asteroid so much as about how badly distracted our society has become, starting at the top with President Streep. People are focused on any number of other matters, such as celebrity breakups, rather than the asteroid.

Then again, the brilliant Yuval Noah Harani in his book“Sapiens” contends that the ability to gossip about each other is one of the key factors that set us apart from and above the the other creatures on our planet.

Back to the movie. Television talkshow culture is roundly satirized, but we’ve been watching versions of that almost as long as there have been talkshows, so nothing new there.

DiCaprio plays a rumpled professor from Lansing and is believable in the role. Honestly, thanks to him and Lawrence, the film is rather entertaining at times.

It definitely is diverting. I forgot my own misery for a minute as I contemplated what I would do if one of the stories I collated tomorrow was that the next comet was going to hit Chicago.

IDK that I can really recommend “Don’t Look Up” unconditionally, despite the stellar cast, but it’s certainly worth viewing once, I suppose. By contrast, “Passengers” (2016) is a film you can watch several times, partially because Michael Sheen is so memorable as a robot working on the spaceship as a bartender.

And I imagine more than one bartender out there knows something about what it’s like to act like a robot. Certainly his or her customers do.

But before I forget, both of these Jennifer Lawrence movies feature a getaway attempt, in the new film led by some sort of a sick billionaire with all of the charm of a Zuckerberg, or a Musk or a Bezos, which is to say none.

And in the end, humanity somehow or another, does find a way to escape reality once again.

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