Much like our planet, Ron Perlman heats up over Don’t Look Up critics

Apparently, “at least we tried to do something” isn’t as comforting to the Don’t Look Up creative team as it was the characters. The makers and stars of Adam McKay’s star-studded, big-budget Netflix film that posits a world where everyday people don’t care about climate change, have been lambasting critics who didn’t find their two-and-half-hour epic funny or convincing.

Ron Perlman, who has a rather small but very funny role in the film, is the latest to take a swing at the critical elite who dared to turn their critical eye toward the film. Speaking to The Independent, Perlman expressed, um, disappointment with critics who happened to not like his movie—though, phrasing it in his own eloquent way.

“Fuck you and your self-importance and this self-perpetuating need to say everything bad about something just so that you can get some attention for something that you had no idea about creating,” Perlman said. “It’s corrupt. And it’s sick. And it’s twisted.”

It is twisted how some critics evaluated the film and wrote an opinion for attention, rather than, say their jobs, which is to evaluate and write about movies. For his part, though, he understands that “the internet has almost killed journalism” because bad reviews did not exist before the advent of the World Wide Web. “Now journalism is trying to do everything they can to co-opt and maintain their importance,” which is why no movies get good reviews anymore.

Perlman isn’t the only one pissed about the response. Director Adam McKay and co-writer David Sirotta have been telling Twitter what they think of the response to the movie since its release. To that end, they’ve accused journalists of burying the movie for daring to speak out about climate change and hold the media to account for its role in stagnating an actual response to the crisis.

While McKay implied that there’s no conceivable way someone could dislike his film and be concerned about climate change. Which, fair. He’s right. There’s no way someone could do two things at once: agree with a movie’s message but disagree with how the message is framed. People are dumb, an appropriate sentiment considering that’s a very pertinent theme in the movie.

Of course, some people did like the movie. It’s being nominated for awards, including a nomination for the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Don’t Look Up also won the American Film Institute’s “Movie Of The Year” award and secured a spot on the National Board Of Review’s top 10 of 2021. But that’s the thing about movie stars today, they all want their participation trophy. The entitlement of this generation, it’s really unlike anything we’ve seen before. It’s as if they expect accolades just for showing up!

That said, Don’t Look Up did get a pretty mixed review from The A.V. Club. Reviewer Jesse Hassenger wrote, “Don’t Look Up is both types of blunt: It makes no bones about exactly what the filmmakers think of climate-change deniers and social-media distractions, and it repeatedly blunts the impact of its satire by calling its shots early, often, and loudly.”

We’ll try to like the movie more next time, Ron.