Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die overview – An AI satire that’s the work of a really indignant filmmaker

The worth of creativeness – the true, human stuff AI may by no means hope to the touch – has been put to the check with Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It’s ideologically flawed, structurally jumbled, and slightly too enamoured of its dystopian predecessors (shades of Terminator and Edge of Tomorrow right here). But it’s additionally form of splendidly private, cranky and spiked – like an affronted hedgehog attempting repeatedly to ram your shin.

A cat-adjacent monster seems at one level, and its design is so foolish and aggressively uncool that I discovered myself feeling warmly affectionate in direction of it. Filmmaking is so hyperconscious now. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a throwback to when mainstream artists would dare to throw a number of concepts on the wall and see what sticks.

Sam Rockwell, taking part in an unnamed time traveller in a plastic raincoat, turns as much as a diner to lecture its prospects about how their extreme social media use has robbed them of their dignity. In the long run, he warns, half the inhabitants will die whereas the opposite half are too busy doomscrolling in mattress to note. This is his 118th try to divert that course, if solely the fitting individuals would volunteer for his righteous campaign.

Cut to: a bunch of recognisable faces, amongst them Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña as Janet and Mark, married academics; Juno Temple as Susan, a grieving mom; Asim Chaudhry as Uber driver Scott; and Haley Lu Richardson as Ingrid, who was born allergic to digital gadgets and wifi.

Verbinski is essentially related along with his big-budget successes (three Pirates of the Caribbean movies) and one big-budget failure (2013’s The Lone Ranger). But there’s extra right here than franchise work and studio-friendly competence – there’s the darker, extra idiosyncratic streak that when noticed him open the third Pirates movie with a mass execution sequence, ending with the dying of a small boy. His most up-to-date film, 2016’s A Cure for Wellness, was a thrillingly confounding Gothic delirium appropriately headlined by Mia Goth.

“It’s all your fault, you’re equally complicit,” the time traveller howls, like a person in a remark part, and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die regrettably carries over his curiosity solely within the signs, by no means the causes. No one’s finger ever truly bothers to level in direction of the firms who began all this. Matthew Robinson’s script haphazardly begins to dish out backstories for a few of these characters (Scott, notably, is neglected), and we see Mark and Janet battle by means of a zombie horde of teenagers, their options ghoulishly lit by their cellphone screens.

Still, there’s some real venom in Verbinski’s method, and these vignettes arguably really feel stronger than the typical Black Mirror episode, as a result of the main target isn’t on impressing cleverness on the viewers. Instead, they launch slightly of the filmmaker’s pent-up frustration. Characters communicate within the eerily chipper patter of the Stepford Wives. Police fortunately gun down hostage victims. An organization clones the kid victims of college shootings for a tidy price (there’s a reduced model with adverts). The latter is so bleak and imply that it feels genuinely provocative in a method few fashionable satires dare.

That could, understandably, flip some audiences away, particularly when it’s been paired with Rockwell’s typical ping-pong-ball allure. But, as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die will get weirder and weirder, it solely additional gives the proof for its personal thesis. As the time traveller warns, “AI is going to try to give you everything you ever wanted… but in the end it’s all a lie.” You can name this one messy, however not less than it’s trustworthy.

Dir: Gore Verbinski. Starring: Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Juno Temple. Cert 15, 134 minutes.

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ is in cinemas from 20 February