One of the time honored traditions of Fantastic Fest is the secret screening. This is basically dealer’s choice in a festival setting – where you book tickets and pray for the best. Now I’ve done more than a few of these over the years and sometimes you’ll catch a film that was never on your radar, which becomes one of your favorites of your fest and may not see release for quite sometime, OR you’ll catch something that comes out in a few days, that you probably wouldn’t have seen on your own volition – that was fine. This year I caught 3 secret screenings and I saw two I really loved, one of which I will be covering in this review and that is Gore Verbinski’s first film in almost a decade the man on a mission sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die – a film that singularly resonated with every part of my eclectic person.
The film starts off with our “man from the future” (Sam Rockwell) entering a small diner late at night looking for a group of brave individuals, who are tired of being chronically plugged in and want to help him stop the apocalyptic singularity that will be invented that night by a nine year-old boy. Before you get worried, don’t worry this isn’t Looper, think more 12 Monkeys. The rub is he’s already done this over a hundred times over and over, and he needs to find the perfect mix of wannabe heroes to finally pull off this mission. After a monologue that has Rockwell delivering a speech that has the same intensity, yet a more family friendly flavor than his speech on season 3 of The White Lotus, he begins picking his team. Through his vetting process we are clued in that he might not just be some crazy homeless rando that walked off the street, as he begins dealing out intimate details on those he comes across from previous attempts.
The real meat and potatoes of the piece comes once the team is assembled and we begin to understand just why they’re there. Verbinski uses this to dig into the different topics that are all sort of symptoms of the same issue with a razor sharp satirical edge. We have a pair of teachers (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz) who just before stepping into the diner were stalked by a group of students mysteriously turned into zombies by their cell phones. We have a woman (Juno Temple) struggling with grief, who lost her son in a school shooting and just came from a support group, after having her dead child cloned. And finally we have my personal favorite, a professional party princess (Haley Lu Richardson) who’s allergic to cell phones and wifi, hence her profession.
It’s how Verbinski weaves their stories together, while having them attempt to complete this mission that feels part Dirty Dozen and part punk rock manifesto as the scrappy team of strangers who are all victims of this technological age try to take down this threat. It’s almost like if Black Mirror was a charming comedy. I am not going to lie, it’s VERY heavy handed at times in how it lays out its big anti-tech message, but that’s really the only way you can break through the screen induced fog most have in this day and age. Also, the fractured nature of the narrative, works overtime to help keep folks who may have difficulty with their attention spans engaged. But for me personally, I was locked in and it resonated with a lot of beliefs I hold very closely about the perils and pitfalls of this new digital age that is now an inevitability.
The cast here bringing this to life is nothing short of spectacular. Rockwell just oozes chaotically good charisma as he leads the group through the night. It’s not an easy job, because we’re still doubting if all of this is real or possibly even a simulation, and he walks that line selling a little bit of all three extremely well, while dealing out some great comedic moments. Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz, two of my favorite MCU break outs, and here they really show what they can do – both comedically and dramatically in their quieter moments together. Finally, Haley Lu Richardson and Juno Temple who shoulder the emotional weight of the film in their respective journeys. It’s the fractured heart and soul of Good Luck that really caught me by surprise, especially when we begin to understand why Rockwell hasn’t recruited the Princess in any of his hundred previous missions.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die kept sort of reminding me of Attack the Block, in that you have this scrappy group of survivors overcoming their limitations and trying to save the world in a hyper-stylisized narrative – think Terry Gilliam meets Ready Player One. To be honest it’s something a lot of these films struggle with, is dealing with the sort of anticipation of this thing they talk about for 90 minutes only to confront it in the last 10 and not even remotely come close to meeting your expectations. Here that’s not the case, personally I was just awestruck by the visuals of the final act of the film as we enter the endgame and the stakes are significantly raised. It’s also good to keep in mind not everyone makes it either, and Rockwell does have to sacrifice more than a few of his strongest soldiers for the greater good, but that also allows the film to have some real consequence.
I feel like Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a surreal cyberpunk masterwork that actually did its homework and isn’t afraid to dig into the more controversial symptoms and consequences of our actions as a society. Rockwell perfectly describes our current socio-political technological climate in a tirade that was reminiscent of Dennis Leary’s MTV rants from back in the day, laying out the grim reality we’ve created for ourselves. I think the reason I loved this film particularly is because while Verbinski doesn’t sugarcoat his message, but thankfully he doesn’t abandon all hope either, because he never underestimates the sheer tenacity of the human spirit. As someone who works with AI and tech on a daily basis Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die successfully cracks the code in dealing out not only some real solutions, but showing how it all affects everyone differently and what we need to do to stop it.
It’s not just a film, but it’s a movement, a call to arms, and with that said – “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die”.
