Don’t Look Up, Don’t Look Down: 2021 in Film

 [Author’s note: I accidentally published this piece roughly a week early, in unfinished form. This is the actual finished version.]

Don’t Look Up is the new end-of-the-world dramedy from director Adam McKay, starring a plethora of talent too long to list here. It’s funny, it’s painful, it’s infuriating, it’s uplifting; in other words, it’s everything the end of the world should be. Intermingling with films both better and worse, Don’t Look Up is nonetheless my 2021 film of the year.

At the core of Don’t Look Up are two astronomers, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), who embark on a mission to warn the world that a newly discovered comet will end all life on Earth. Along the way, that mission gets gummed up by indifference, politics, and capitalism. This is a movie for everyone who’s ever felt that cooperation and unity are the most unrealistic aspects of films like Armageddon, Independence Day, and 2012.

As a movie, Don’t Look Up is excellent, if frequently unremarkable. As a cultural artifact, Don’t Look Up is almost painfully tapped into the zeitgeist. The filmmakers go to great lengths to give audiences a farewell tour, of sorts, to the various aspects of life in 2021 that might, as in the film, provide an obstacle to our survival as a species. It’s depressing and apocalyptic, much like the tour of Warner intellectual property in Space Jam: A New Legacy, another 2021 film that suggests we as a society might deserve everything Comet Dibiasky throws at us.

Space Jam‘s approach to the various IPs it travels through — from Harry Potter to Game of Thrones to Casablanca — is the very essence of content reductionism. In this way, though, it may be the defining film of the modern era: a late, unwanted sequel that says nothing but does everything, touches everything it can. Watching Space Jam 2, I understood what the two astronomers in Don’t Look Up felt: we may well be witnessing the beginning of the end.

Among the roadblocks to human survival in Don’t Look Up is President Orlean (Meryl Streep), a leader who horrifyingly answers the question, “what if somehow both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election after being merged in a Cronenbergian teleportation accident?” Orlean variously brushes off, exploits, and politicizes the incoming comet depending on its political usefulness at the time. In the end, it is her political and economic calculus that helps to doom the world and bring on armageddon.

If Don’t Look Up was the best apocalypse of the year, Army of the Dead was probably the worst. Zack Snyder must be a gifted filmmaker to make almost inherently interesting subject matter so boring. I spent the bulk of Army of the Dead on my Switch playing Downwell, a game where you fall down a well. It’s a better game than Army of the Dead is a movie.

Speaking of zombies, 2021 also gave us multiple biopics that lurch around undead and obligatory. Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos and Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye offer little in the way of insight or depth. Like most biopics these days, and arguably throughout history, they’re exercises in oneiric thespianism. At best, this can deliver amazing performances; at worst, you get a film like Being the Ricardos.

It’s telling that the cast of Don’t Look Up delivered better performances than many of this year’s classical performance vehicles. But one of the finest performances I’ve seen all year came from Jane Campion’s quiet, brutal The Power of the Dog. Amidst excellentturns by Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst, it was actually Jesse Plemons that stood out to me as the core of the film: simple, unassuming, roiling with inner tension.

Still, as acting goes, it’s hard to ignore Emma Stone as Cruella, a performance so over-the-top it almost loops back and becomes subtle again. Cruella was a delightful piece of cinematic candy: sweet, delicious, and utterly, almost joyfully, without substance. It’s a nice antidote to a film like Don’t Look Up, which admittedly at times feels like it’s too dense for its own good.

Speaking of too dense for its own good, let’s finally talk about Dune. I had at one point planned a piece contrasting Villeneuve’s Dune with Lynch’s and Jodorowsky’s, but I found it difficult to conjure the passion required for such an undertaking. Watching Jodorowsky’s Dune is the closest I think we can get to the Dune we need, even if Villeneuve’s overwrought exercise in expansiveness is the one we deserve.

I still haven’t seen The Matrix 4, which is surprising given the formative role the Wachowskis — through The Matrix but also beyond — have repeatedly played in the development of my cinematic sensibilities. Instead I watched Reminiscence, which was about as bad a Blade Runner or Matrix wannabe as could be imagined. It’s could be a film about the dangers of living too much in the past, similar to the title concept of Don’t Look Up, but instead it’s just bad neo-noir hair-twirling.

But on the topic of neo-noir, that’s a category I find myself tagging to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film The Lost Daughter, a difficult-to-classify film that operates across genre. It’s nonetheless a film about the parts of ourselves we hide and perhaps try to leave behind. Olivia Colman’s protagonist Leda may well be an unreliable narrator projecting herself onto the city in which she vacations, losing herself in herself.

Personally I’ve been losing myself in the soundtrack for Annette, a film that underwhelms compared to director Leos Carax’s prior effort Holy Motors, but Sparks have created one of the most amazing cinematic soundscapes I’ve ever heard. I can’t get it out of my head.

The best film I saw in 2021, though, and by a wide margin, was Drive My Car. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story was the film I needed after the past two years. Expect a full length take on Drive My Car soon; the film deserves its own space.

There’s more, always more, but honestly I just want to go listen to Annette for the fiftieth time. If I could summarize 2021 in film, I’d probably just screen Don’t Look Up, but otherwise this article will have to do. I trudged through a lot of the bad and found a few of the good, but for me what defines this past year is not so much the films but the return of cinema, for better or worse, from the mire of the pandemic.