Will we be able to prevent the end of the world if we’re having so much fun with it?
Just like Nineteen Eighty-Four presented a dystopia of absolute control sustained by brutal coercion, whereas Brave New World showed it was easier to sustain it by seduction, the film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks us to imagine a Skynet that intervenes in the timeline to ensure its own existence, but instead of bothering with assassin robots to enforce its violent rule, it preemptively lures humankind into passive obedience via irresistible apps and delightful virtual environments. This time, the scruffy resistance fighter who jumps from the future to prevent the machine takeover doesn’t come with the warning that AI will seize the bigger arsenal, but that we will be too absorbed by our phones to do anything about it.
This time traveler doesn’t bring the most persuasive sales pitch. At the start of the film, he randomly shows up at a diner and asks who among the present is willing to join him in his unspecified quest to save the world. Understandably, no one believes him. In his defense, let’s keep in mind that he’s given the same speech at the same diner over a hundred times, and it’s always ended in disaster, so by now he’s tired of pleading. For some reason, he’s convinced that that place contains a set of people with the precise combination of skills that will help his mission, and in all his attempts, he’s yet to find the right selection of team members.
What follows from that point on is a dual narrative structure: on one thread we watch the improvised squad of heroes clumsily and hilariously evade police cars, masked gunmen, paid actors, a flashmob of hypnotized teenagers and a certain nightmarish monstrosity I won’t spoil, while on the other thread we watch the respective backstories of some of our heroes, who have already had some unpleasant experiences with the convergence of digital trends that will result in AI’s tyranny. In those flashback segments we learn about addictive videogames, consciousness uploading, a clandestine cloning business, the trivialization of school shootings, the omnipresence of militaristic propaganda, the difficulty of living off the grid and a terrifying form of mass mind control—one third of this movie has enough material to fill a whole season of Black Mirror, except with an actual sense of humor and sans the nihilistic posturing.
The time traveler’s mission turns out to be rather straightforward; the hard part is getting from point A to point B in one piece. Most of the film’s entertainment value comes from watching complete amateurs die in ridiculous ways. And that’s an obvious point of self-critique; you can’t write an action script about the toxic potential of entertainment without acknowledging your complicity in the problem. Accordingly, the time traveler warns against the easy promise of a neat plot with a satisfying ending, which is the AI’s favorite way of distracting humans from their oppression. And the film itself avoids giving us a happy ever after; the ending gives very strong hints that the AI has far more control over the events than the time traveler realizes. Maybe that’s the most ingenious form of propaganda: letting us enjoy a story where we believe we have a fighting chance.
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
