Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on gigantic television.
Gore Verbinksi has a surprisingly good track record as a director. Not many people could create an entertaining movie out of a Disney ride, after all. Verbinski’s latest, Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, is a similar sort of project. This is a movie that shouldn’t work in a lot of ways, but does in spite of itself. It’s also a movie that you can point to when people complain that all movies are the same or that Hollywood is just producing remakes and sequels.
That said, there are certainly going to be people who will tell you that Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die is in many ways a very long episode of Black Mirror, and there are certainly times when that seems to fit. There are also moments where it is far too surreal for Black Mirror, but much of it has the same feel. It’s darkly comic like many episodes and is very much a warning against technology, AI in specific. And there are strong connections to other movies and stories. There’s a lot of 12 Monkeys here just for a start, and the opening sequence is reminiscent in many ways of Pulp Fiction.
This is also a movie where a strict accounting of the plot would take several thousand words, and nobody here (including me) is signing up for that. So I’m going to hit the broad strokes of this for a couple of paragraphs and then we’ll move on to the actual critical bits of this.
One night in a Los Angeles diner, a man (Sam Rockwell, and referred to as The Man from the Future) wearing a transparent trench coat and mismatched shoes and strapped with what clearly looks like a bomb walks in. He tells the patrons that this is not a robbery, but a sort of intervention. The world is about to go to hell—an AI is about to be invented that will essentially spell the end of human civilization. In the future, where he is from, half of the population has died, and the other half essentially lives in an AI-generated world. He has been to this diner more than 100 times on this night, trying to find the right combination of patrols to get him to the correct way of stopping the AI.
This time, his team is going to consist of married couple Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple), Scout leader Bob (Daniel Barnett), and suicidal loner Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson). We’re going to see a little backstory on a few of these people, all of which will play out by the end. Mark and Janet are teachers who experienced a revolt of students all mesmerized by their phones. Susan’s son has been killed in a school shooting, but has been revived as a clone, who looks like her son but very much doesn’t act like him. Ingrid is allergic to technology, and has lost her boyfriend to a virtual world. Over the course of the night, the group will be attacked by pig mask-wearing assassins, hordes of rampaging teens, police, and a few Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man-type creations that are genuinely better left unspoiled.
The truth is that Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die is not an episode of Black Mirror. It is a mashup of several potential episodes. While the overarching plot—an AI that will effectively destroy society—is certainly a potential episode, so too are Mark and Janet being attacked by zombie-like students. Susan dealing with a son who has been cloned and returned, but is also forced to speak ads on a daily basis and who has only a couple of personality traits feels like its own episode. A woman allergic to tech and wi-fi with a boyfriend addicted to tech and wi-fi feels like its own episode as well.
Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die in many ways is most reminiscent to me of Don’t Look Up in terms of its overall theme. Both of the movies clearly want do be deeply sardonic and blackly comic (and this one is better). Both are commentaries on society, using some clear exaggeration to discuss a clear issue with modern human behavior—science denial in the one case and rampant use of social media, phones, and AI in the other. Both want to drill into that deeper message. It’s not a mistake that the teens are shown to be essentially zombies, or that Susan’s cloning of her son is an artificial experience in customer service, and a callous experience that continues with other parents.
This is satire, and it’s pretty good satire. Sam Rockwell is one of the best actors working right now, and his delivery throughout this is evidence of that case. The whole cast is good (Juno Temple picks good projects and does them well), but it’s Rockwell’s movie, and his combination of resigned pessimism and desperate hope works perfectly.
This was fun. I wanted to like it a lot, and it turns out that I did. That feels rare these days.
Why to watch Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die : Sam Rockwell is one of the best actors in the game.
Why not to watch: It’s a mash-up that may not work for you.
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