Don’t Look Up skilfully strikes a balance between dark comedy and wake-up call - Anthony Clavane

It is not, as some have claimed, a 21st century Dr Strangelove, War of the Worlds or On The Beach. It is not a patch on Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth or even the original, and truly brilliant, Planet Of The Apes, which ends with a devastated Charlton Heston falling to his knees in despair and condemning humanity for triggering an apocalyptic nuclear war.

“You finally really did it,” he screams. “You maniacs. You blew it up.”

Which isn’t to say I disliked Don’t Look Up. Far from it. Indeed, I found the star-studded black comedy to be thought-provoking, engaging and sporadically funny.

I have to say I find it puzzling that it has been slated by so many critics.

Some have expressed outright loathing. Rolling Stone, for example, called it “a disaster movie in more ways than one”. Ouch.

Perusing the reviews, the words “blunt”, “shrill” and “smug” make several appearances. It achieved a Rotten Tomatoes rating of only 55 per cent.

As I said, the satirical blockbuster is not a masterpiece – but there is a great deal to commend it.

Released on Christmas Eve, it quickly became the number one movie worldwide on Netflix. According to those who carefully study these things, it is all set to become the streaming service’s most-watched film of all time.

The fact that is so popular is a great thing in its favour. For although it tells the story of two astronomers – played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio – who try desperately to warn an indifferent world that a gigantic asteroid is on the way to wipe out humanity, it clearly has an important, contemporary, political message to impart.

As its writer-director Adam McKay told GQ magazine, the movie is an “analogy or an allegory for the climate crisis”. The gigantic asteroid plunging towards earth is a metaphor for climate change.

This seems to be one of the two reasons why there has been such a ferocious backlash against the film. To climate change deniers, it is deemed to be too propagandistic.

But to those of us who are not in denial about melting glaciers, rising sea levels and burning forests, it is pleasing to see such a bitingly satirical attack on society’s short-sighted complacency provoke such a lot of online conversation.

The other reason for the backlash is that it takes aim at those media outlets who, McKay argues, have so far failed to raise the alarm about environmental disaster.

Indeed, it goes further in brutally exposing the shallow, self-obsessed and blinkered nature of those outlets.

One of the sharpest, and funniest, scenes is Lawrence and DiCaprio’s treatment at the hands of a popular daily news show which gives more coverage to celebrity trivia, vacuous gossip and all-round, general frivolity than the planet-killing asteroid story.

True, it lacks subtlety in its sweeping denunciation of the “elites” who run the mass media. It is occasionally heavy-handed in promoting its “profits over planet” message and doesn’t always hold together too well artistically.

But McKay skilfully strikes a balance between dark comedy and wake-up call and is right to have a pop at the venality, vapidity and stupidity of some of our political and business leaders. In particular, he is right to highlight the growing, insidious influence of social media.

Mark Rylance steals the show as the billionaire businessman Peter Isherwell, who is essentially Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook all rolled into one.

As Meryl Streep’s self-satisfied president Janie Orlean acknowledges, Isherwell is the most powerful man in the world. Rylance’s soft-talking, scarily-sinister Big Tech narcissist, who attempts to profit from the incoming space object, is more frightening than any Bond villain has been over the past six decades.

Don’t Look Up’s apocalyptic slapstick might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But, thanks to its glittering array of Hollywood A-listers, it has attracted an enormous amount of attention – and will hopefully encourage viewers to put the issue of climate change at the top of their priority list.