Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Smash Netflix’s Don’t Look Up But Viewers Defend It

Rotten Tomatoes’ disaster-comedy Don’t Look Up is failing to connect with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but audiences are loving it. If you take all the jokes we’ve all been making about Armageddon for the last 20 years, and sprinkle in some political commentary (it hails from the filmmakers behind The Big Short and Vice, after all), you’ll be somewhere in the neighborhood of what Don’t Look Up is doing. But in spite of being stacked with award-winning actors, the movie is not quite a critical darling, scoring only 55% on Rotten Tomatoes. It does, however, have a 77% positive rating from audiences.

The film centers on an astronomer who discovers a potentially extinction-level event, but can’t convince people to take it seriously. Whether it’s selfish politicians with personal agendas, or just people who are in denial and think the whole thing is entertainment that will take care of itself, it’s a movie about how experts are ignored in favor of comfortable lies.

That’s obviously something that has been discussed a lot in the last two years, and some of the criticism of the film is that the commentary is too heavy-handed and not subtle enough for critics’ liking. 

Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student, and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) make an astounding discovery of a comet orbiting within the solar system. The problem: it’s on a direct collision course with Earth. The other problem? No one really seems to care. Turns out warning mankind about a planet-killer the size of Mount Everest is an inconvenient fact to navigate. With the help of Dr. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), Kate and Randall embark on a media tour that takes them from the office of an indifferent President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her sycophantic son and Chief of Staff, Jason (Jonah Hill), to the airwaves of The Daily Rip, an upbeat morning show hosted by Brie (Cate Blanchett) and Jack (Tyler Perry). With only six months until the comet makes impact, managing the 24-hour news cycle and gaining the attention of the social media obsessed public before it’s too late proves shockingly comical — what will it take to get the world to just look up?! 

You can see Don’t Look Up on Netflix now.