Hey, Gore Verbinski? Fuck you too.
Seriously, folks, I have no idea what I could’ve done to piss off Gore Verbinski. I’ve never met him. I’ve never talked with him. I haven’t seen or reviewed a single film he made since Rango 15 years ago. Yet here we are with Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, a film that plays like it was painstakingly built for the specific purpose of pissing me off.
Sam Rockwell plays an anonymous time traveler, sent from the future to try and stop the machine uprising. Long story short, AI has reached the point where it’s only an hour or two away from achieving full-blown sentience, so now the Traveler has come back to try and stop the apocalypse. To achieve this, the Traveler seeks help at a diner a few blocks away from Ground Zero, where he’s somehow resolutely convinced he will find the right combination of people with the right set of skills to get the job done. Even after he’s apparently failed 117 times.
Yes, it’s a bonkers batshit story. Lucky for the Traveler, there just happen to be a select few people at this diner with bonkers batshit stories of their own.
Thus we have our anthology structure, as each major cast member gets their own story, all interconnected within the framework of the Traveler’s mission. Along the way, we get a character who’s literally allergic to cell phones and wireless signals, a soulless corporate-sponsored clone of a kid who died in a school shooting, a guy who literally checks out of the world so he can be hooked up to a VR machine for all his life, and cell phones turning teenagers into a horde of zombies.
Yes, folks. We’ve got a movie that screams out “Cell phones are turning our teenagers into literal zombies!” In goddamn 2026.
What we’ve got here is an absurdly heightened surrealist action sci-fi comedy. This unfortunately means that the world-building is bullshit, the characters are one-dimensional jokes, and the numerous plot holes are insurmountable. As a direct result, when the film tries to make a sincere statement about highly relevant topics, it’s impossible to take seriously.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You cannot make any kind of statement about computers, technology, or social media on any kind of emotional level. We’ve lived with this tech for too long, we know how it works, and we’ve seen the benefits and drawbacks for ourselves. It’s ignorant fearmongering nonsense to complain about the lack of “human connection” when we’ve got technology that allows us to instantly communicate and organize with millions all over the world. We need something more than anger and disgust, or the end result only comes off as incoherent technophobic rage-baiting.
It takes effort and insight to say something about social media and AI that we don’t already know. Making any kind of well-reasoned and actionable statement about internet culture takes an intellectual approach. We need something that will make the audience feel smarter and more informed for watching.
You want a film that shows how social media is changing teenagers for better and for worse? Check out Love, Simon. Check out Didi. Check out Booksmart or Eighth Grade. All of those movies were respectful, thorough, and even-handed toward their subject matter. By contrast, depicting teenagers as if they’re literally being turned into mindless zombies is crass, uninspired, lazy, spiteful, fearmongering horseshit.
To be clear, I get that the film is supposed to be a satire. I get that the filmmakers are trying to make a point by taking a problem and blowing it way out of proportion. Taking that approach with this particular subject matter was a huge mistake. There are enough genuine problems with AI and social media without exaggerating them to impossible absurdity. On a similar note, it’s absolutely true that school shootings are a huge problem and it’s disturbing how we’ve come to treat them like business as usual. But the film takes that normalizing concept to an extent that’s not only brain-dead, it’s outright insulting and disrespectful.
The film wholeheartedly screams that we’re losing our humanity to our cell phones. Yet the movie is populated with such shrill and obnoxious parodies of humanity that the humanist message is delivered in a deeply misanthropic way. Moreover, I get that the film takes a vehement stance against AI and VR and anything that isn’t “real”. But I’m not seeing anything in this movie that makes the “real” world worth fighting for. Time and again, the filmmakers go off on angry incoherent screeds with half-baked ideas of what they’re against and no idea what they’re for.
Then there’s the cast. Sam Rockwell, Michael Pena, and Zazie Beetz are the headliners here, and they’re all phoning in the same schtick they’ve already done in so many other and better movies. I was honestly more impressed with the lesser known actors, most especially Haley Lu Richardson. I’m still getting used to seeing Juno Temple as an adult actor in adult roles, but it’s astounding how well she’s aging artistically. Temple is really coming into her own.
Put simply, what we’ve got with Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die is a massive pile of free-floating hostility toward modern technology and people in general, hopelessly and willfully ignorant of its own subject matter. Thus the statements are half-baked at best, the themes are incoherent, and the film contributes directly to the very same brain-dead fearmongering atmosphere it’s railing against. The only thing to make this film remotely interesting is the surreal aesthetic, which only serves to make the film even more heightened, which in turn exaggerates the thematic statements beyond anything that could possibly be taken seriously.
Gentle readers, Gore Verbinski made an Ari Aster movie. We don’t need that shit. Fuck this movie.