DiCaprio tackles climate crisis in satire 'Don't Look Up'

The dark satire "Don't Look Up" stars DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as astronomers whose warnings about imminent catastrophe fall on deaf ears in a starkly partisan and divided United States led by an incompetent president -- played by Meryl Streep.

Fresh from attending the UN COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow, DiCaprio said Adam McKay's script solved the "next to impossible" problem of making a suspenseful film about a crisis that "evolves over a century."

"How do we as a species, as a society, as a culture, politically, deal with imminent armageddon?" DiCaprio asked a Los Angeles preview screening audience on Thursday.

"He had cracked the code, so to speak, on how to bring all the insanity that we as the human race are responding to this crisis, in a two-hour format," he said.

The film, also starring Ariana Grande, Cate Blanchett, Mark Rylance and Jonah Hill, hits theaters December 10 before streaming on Netflix from Christmas Eve.

McKay, whose wide-ranging career spans cult comedies "Anchorman" and "Step Brothers" and satirical works "The Big Short" and "Vice", has become one of Hollywood's most in-demand directors.

Reviews for "Don't Look Up" are under embargo, but initial reaction Thursday was effusive, with Variety's Clayton Davis predicting it will make "a seismic impact (pun intended)" on the Oscars race.

DiCaprio said he hoped the film would "start to create different conversations, and more people talking about it will push the private sector and the powers that be to make massive change."

But he admitted he had "not much" optimism about humanity's ability to resolve the climate crisis.