EDITOR’S NOTE: Apologies for arriving to your inbox a little late. I will try to always have this be ready on Tuesday morning, but sometimes life will intervene.
Ryan Gosling's new sci-fi epic Project Hail Mary just became the biggest non franchise opening since Oppenheimer in 2023, which is great for him, great for Hollywood, and great for fans of original sci-fi. BUT! It certainly kicks a little more dirt on the carcass of Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die which opened three weeks ago at the box office and promptly shriveled up and died. It’s a real shame, because It seems destined to become a Saturday morning streaming classic. If it’s playing anywhere close by I encourage you to read no further and just go see it.
GLHFDD marks the return of director Gore Verbinski who hadn’t made a movie in 9 years since his incredibly strange, overlong, yet super fun gothic freakout A Cure for Wellness. Verbinski’s career is marked by extreme highs (Pirates of the Caribbean) and extreme lows (The Pirates of the Caribbean 2), genre classics (The Ring), and cult classics (Rango). He can make huge budget flops like The Lone Ranger and low budget treasures like The Weather Man. I’m not sure there’s an analog for his career in history. He changes genres and ambitions seemingly with every film and almost always makes something interesting. I really hope the (lack of) success of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die doesn’t mean he’ll be put back in movie jail for another 9 years. The film originated as a TV pilot written by Matthew Robinson (The Invention of Lying) and eventually found its way to Verbinski, its influences include Groundhog Day, The Matrix, and Everything Everywhere All At Once, only everything is a bit uglier and dumber and I mean that as a compliment.
The film opens on a dark evening in a Los Angeles diner when a man known only as “The Man From The Future” bursts through the doors adorned in what looks like an outfit he put together from the contents of a dumpster outside a radioshack. He says he has a bomb and will use it if he doesn’t get a quorum of volunteers to join him on his mission. His mission? To save the world of course.
The man is played by Academy Award winner Sam Rockwell and I'm not sure there’s a more reliably entertaining actor working right now. He has a gonzo energy dial within him that he seems to be able to turn up and down depending on the part and in GLHFDD he’s got it cranked up to somewhere between up and top. Ironically he’s the solid center of the film around which several other characters orbit. Haley Lu Richarson (The White Lotus Season 2) plays a girl allergic to wifi. Michael Peña (Ant Man) and Zazie Beetz (Atlanta) play a couple of teachers contending with their students’ addiction to their phones. Juno Temple (Ted Lasso) plays a woman mourning a loss with some secrets of her own. They make up the basis of the group, that can only be described as rag-tag, dragged into The Man’s plan.
Structurally it bears a striking similarity to last year’s Weapons. We continually loop back to the beginning to learn the origins of the characters and what brought them to the diner. Each chapter plays out like one of the more irreverent Black Mirror episodes. Verbinski includes many of the visual gags he peppered through the original Pirates Trilogy and the cast is more than game. While about 20 minutes too long the result is funny and exciting with some minor twists and a raucous 3rd act.
3.5/5
While I won’t spoil any major plot points below, I will be talking about the themes which can be a type of spoiler if you want to know in blind.
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The themes of the film are not delivered with the subtlety of our most beloved satires, but incisive commentary doesn’t seem to be the aim of this film. It’s aims appear to be - beat the view over the head with “A.I. → BAD!” “Technology → Dangerous!” “Make Human connections!” “Read Books!” “DON’T PLAY VIDEO GAMES!” There’s a serious old person’s fear of youth and technology running through the film. Watching it was hard not to hear Tim Robinson in Hot Dog Costume’s voice in my head, lamenting how “buried in our phones” we are, but because I agree with those sentiments, I was unbothered by the sometimes clumsy way they were delivered.
Beetz and Peña contending with a horde of students literally turned into zombies by their phones has all the subtlety of a hot dog car crashing through a store window. BUT! The Terminator imagined it to be a far off future when the machines took over and made humanity obsolete, but as that far future becomes closer and closer to our present time, maybe the need of complexity and subtlety isn’t as pressing. Art is, and should be, a reflection of the time in which it was created and this seems to be a reflection of all of us screaming. There’s not all that much subtlety to a primal scream.