The moment when I realized that Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s satire about a decadent society facing a world-ending comet, would fail in its grand ambitions arrived early in the movie, when his story briefly took aim at my employer, the New York Times.

Oh, the newspaper is called the “New York Herald” in the movie, but it’s got my own newspaper’s font and brand and prominence: It’s the first place that the protagonists, a pair of Michigan State scientists — played by Leonardo DiCaprio in amusing middle-aged-dad mode and Jennifer Lawrence in goth-girl camouflage — turn to when their attempt to alert mankind to our impending extinction is ignored by the narcissistic populist occupying the White House.

The movie’s version of the Times runs with their revelations — a story not just about how the planet-killing comet is coming, but also about how a right-wing president (played by Meryl Streep as a brew of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and Hillary Clinton) isn’t doing anything about it for fear of jeopardizing her party’s midterm prospects. But then the scientists make an unsuccessful appearance on morning TV, the Internet ignores their message and turns them into memes, and the Times’ — sorry, the Herald’s — social-media-engagement person breaks the bad news: The story just didn’t break through, the paper’s readership wasn’t all that interested.

And that’s all we hear about the Times/Herald and its readers; thereafter, both disappear from the story entirely.

This fits neatly with the general theme of the movie, which is that America is simply too frivolous, polarized, and anti-intellectual to heed the warnings of scientific Cassandras. (McKay intended Don’t Look Up as an allegory about climate change, though it obviously evolved in the filming to become a movie about the coronavirus era, too.) But as a caricature of the Times and its audience, it’s absurdly off point. Whatever the tendencies of other American demographics, from Donald Trump voters to morning-show viewers to fans of Ariana Grande, I can say with great authority that the arrival of a potentially planet-killing comet on a right-wing president’s watch would not merely interest the Times-reading population; it would be an all-consuming, flood-the-zone, nothing-else-matters obsessive fascination — not just a most-emailed story but the most emailed story of all time.

And in pretending that our readers would ignore the news, in dismissing the reality that credentialed, well-educated, highly influential parts of our culture actually fixate on the apocalyptic and obsess over existential threats, McKay signals that he doesn’t really have any idea of how to satirize the liberal meritocracy. Which in turns means that Don’t Look Up is a satire not of American society in full but just of the parts of American society that he doesn’t like: populist Republicans, callow celebrities, morning-show talking heads, social-media users, and Silicon Valley tycoons.

There are plenty of ripe targets in this range, and a kind of bipartisanship to the film’s critique. But the savaging of the American center-left never cuts particularly deep: The implication, throughout, is that the problem with liberals is that they’re too frivolous or ineffectual or Internet-addled, never that they misuse their power or get anything substantively wrong.

Indeed, save for one long-suffering NASA wise man (Rob Morgan) and a few references to Ivy League scientists, there’s nothing in this movie to suggest that American liberalism has any power at all. The opposition party is nonexistent, and so are the liberal-leaning institutions that have loomed so large in the coronavirus era: The organs of professional expertise, bureaucratic power, Official Science.

Yes, DiCaprio’s character temporarily becomes an Anthony Fauci–style media celebrity, but only because he goes along with the populist administration’s dubious plans for how to deal with the comet, compromising his commitment to peer-reviewed Science for the sake of ephemeral political influence. The idea that technocracy itself, and not just its populist antagonist, might fail under conditions of existential threat is entirely foreign to the movie, whose fundamental message never gets much more complex than a howl of Listen to the scientists! and whose world-picture seems frozen in the Bush era — with Chinese power hand-waved away, and American science and politics the only thing that counts.

It’s all unfortunate, because McKay is still good at his original comedic calling, and there’s some solid scene-by-scene funny business in the movie. (I enjoyed the Tyler Perry–Cate Blanchett version of Morning Joe and Mark Rylance’s whispering-weirdo tech tycoon.) And while a comet’s arrival is a pretty lousy analogue for climate change, for reasons too obvious to belabor, the apocalypse that Don’t Look Up conjures really could have been a good wide-angle lens on general American failure and decline — an extreme case study in how elite incompetence and populist folly exist in symbiosis more than in opposition.

But that would have taken a script that portrayed a fundamentally systemic failure, rather than one that gestures in that direction but finally decides that there’s nothing wrong with American society that couldn’t be fixed if we just gave all the power to our scientists and never elected a populist to the presidency again.