Film Microreview: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

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.

Maybe there's a parallel timeline where 'The Peripheral' hit the mark

It's a shame that a series with so many interesting ideas didn't try to go farther with them

Amazon Studios TV series The Peripheral, an adaptation of William Gibson's 2014 novel, has come up with an original angle on the overstretched "metaphor for class inequality" trope. In this story, scientists from the late 22nd century create alternate possible pasts where they can run unsanctioned experiments on live humans with cosmic impunity. Those other timelines are not seen as having real moral value, but in one of them lives our protagonist, Flynne, an experienced gamer who stumbles upon these secrets after beta-testing a new VR headset, and who is determined to defend her and her world's inherent right to exist.

This is an amplified echo of the cry of protest you can hear from exoticized peoples: Your Vacation Is My Home. Or, in The Peripheral, something more like Your Disposable Petri Dish Is My Spacetime Continuum. Such a concept sounds like it could spark lengthy discussions about the colonial practices still embedded in scientific research, the ethical loopholes of the gig economy, the rights of counterfactual agents, the mutual responsibilities between generations, and the still unsolved safety issues with brain-computer interfaces.

Unfortunately, the show doesn't meet the high expectations set by its premise. A research institute officially known as The Research Institute and a cleptocracy of mafia bosses collectively known as the Klept are the first signs that The Peripheral devoted only the barest of efforts to worldbuilding. Our near future, as shown in a small town in the southern US, looks almost like the present, with the changes established mostly in dialogue: stratospheric medicine prices, a vaguely mentioned Texan war, ubiquitous 3D printing, far superior video game graphics. With the supporting characters, the show follows the opposite approach: they are established implicitly, with minimal exposition, and the viewer doesn't connect who works for whom and who is whose childhood friend until well into the season. The mental bandwidth expended in keeping track of the scant clues about these characters detracts from the viewer's ability to follow the plot.

In the scenes set in the 22nd century, these deficiencies are multiplied: three separate factions are described but not properly introduced until the halfway point, and Flynne, who should serve as our eyes into that society, is persistently kept in the dark about how it works.

Worse problems afflict the visual style of the 22nd century. We only get to see future London as a vague skyline that blends impossibly cyclopean statues with incompletely rendered ruins, or as deliberately secluded side streets that look like the production team only had access to a small number of set designs. It's true that this society is recovering from multiple catastrophes that killed a huge portion of the world's population, but it's inevitable to get a sense of artifice from the continued recourse to the same few sets and the same few immensely powerful characters without ever learning how ordinary life proceeds for the average human.

The conflict between the near future and the not so near future is hindered by unnecessary mystery. Flynne only discovers what the villain wants from her in the last episode, and then almost by chance. Until then it's hard to get invested in the stakes of her fight, because the show insists on delaying as much as possible the moment of letting the viewer know what every faction wants. The lead characters of this future act as if they were facing an imminent crisis of utmost urgency, but then they spend interminable scenes sitting for tea to exchange barbs about their respective leverage and strategic weak points, and it's no longer believable that there's anything actually being fought over.

The Peripheral suffers gravely from this intentional slowness. Each episode spends too much time in revealing too little at a time, and the way the final two episodes resolve all the plotlines may as well have occurred just after the pilot, if only these characters stopped walking around, looking menacing and launching indirect taunts. This ungenerous pacing, combined with the barely-there London of the future, deals a near-fatal blow to the viewer's suspension of disbelief. It's no wonder that the villains managed to convince Flynne that she was playing a video game instead of visiting a physical place, because this supposedly broken and polluted London looks too small and too fake to take seriously.

There's no word yet on whether Amazon will produce a second season of The Peripheral, but if it comes to pass, the producers should ask for a higher VFX budget or larger outdoor sets, and stop being smugly mysterious just for the sake of being smugly mysterious. The viewer is supposed to be given a reason to care, and this first season relied too much on hidden agendas kept hidden too long for the resolution to have the impact it should.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for showing a realistic brother/sister relationship rich in complexity and disparate perspectives, +3 for T'Nia Miller's wonderful acting.

Penalties: −1 for the criminal underutilization of Alexandra Billings, −1 for having a tad too many extraneous subplots, −3 for the whiplash of following too slow a beginning and middle with too rushed an ending.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Review: MegaDeath by Tory Quinn and Marie Vibbert

A thrilling addition to a subgenre that seems, if you'll pardon the figure of speech, done to death

In the deadly tournament subgenre, overcrowded with such memorable entries as Death Race, Tron, Rollerball, Battle Royale, Bloodsport, The Running Man, Mortal Kombat, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, The Hunger Games and Battle Angel Alita, it's interesting to see new stories are still being made. After seemingly every possible angle in this topic has been explored, an author who decides to create yet another deadly tournament story must clear a high bar to not be lumped along with thousands of mediocre imitations.

In the 22nd century where the novel MegaDeath is set, we find many of the same familiar elements: there's a globally broadcast athletic competition, with execution as the punishment for the losing team, and we're told that humankind has adopted this form of regulated mayhem as a cathartic substitute for international war. So far, so samey. Where MegaDeath distinguishes itself is in the extra building blocks of its world: if this sport is going to serve as a replacement for war, it needs to be attached to the same geopolitical consequences. In this world, the country that wins MegaDeath gets priority in setting the global agenda for the next four years, with decreasing amounts of power assigned to the losing countries in order of disqualification. The issues on the table are the same they've always been: trading privileges, taxes and tariffs, allocation of key resources. Whereas they were long ago decided by actual combat, they're now subject to the numbers on the scoreboard.

In a disturbing display of fervor that the novel uses very intentionally to blur the line between patriotic loyalty and hooliganism, the spectators and participants of MegaDeath honestly believe in this system. They'll defend its success at preventing widespread destruction by channeling the animosity between civilizations into a controlled environment that sublimates bloodlust into show business. One of the rules of MegaDeath gives the winning team the right to pillage the defeated territory for an entire day, a practice whose merits are repeatedly defended by some of the protagonists. The underlying assumption is that a mutually agreed period of supervised violence will prevent other, more explosive forms of it.

The stakes are further heightened by the revelation that fans have taken their patriotism to the absurd extreme of gambling their own lives upon the result of the tournament. A vicious circle of social pressure quickly forms because not betting your life is interpreted as not believing in your team's chances of winning. So the losing country will not only lose its top athletes, but also a sizable chunk of its population, which will bring the limited carnage of MegaDeath back to the massive casualties of conventional war. When one team discovers that the betting system might not be fully transparent, their already heavy ethical misgivings are multiplied by the millions of innocents who will die in another country if they win.

The main achievement of this novel, fitting for characters running for their lives before an audience, is the consistently breakneck pacing. The authors comfortably wield the rhythm and momentum needed to tell a nail-biting action story, although this intensity often carries over into other scenes of more reflective nature that needed a different treatment. Despite the minimal space dedicated to developing these characters, their desperation to win is communicated loud and clear. By the final rounds of the competition, their group dynamic resembles that of shell-shocked veterans.

MegaDeath is more enjoyable for the creative depictions of acrobatic violence than for any deep message contained in it. The big villain reveal isn't exactly compelling, and the ensuing discussion about the ethics of the game is held at the simplest level. This is not a book one reads for life-changing insights. This is a spectacle that demands to be experienced through primal impulses, in the blood and sweat of muscled idols whose shoulders bear the weight of the world. If the story is intended to convey any point about its themes, it may be that a replacement for war is no better than real war if it's used for the same ends and feeds the same darkness inside us. A civilization that enthusiastically sends its young to die is already a fallen civilization, and we need to ask ourselves who we're becoming when we cheer for our fellow humans' destruction.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the dynamic style used to narrate action scenes.

Penalties: −1 for clunky exposition, −1 for a less than gracefully executed ending, −1 because most of the transitions between scenes are too abrupt.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Quinn, Tory; Vibbert, Marie. MegaDeath [Level 4 Press, 2022].

I think you should actually worry quite a bit, darling

Besides rehashing The Matrix for tradwives, there's very little that this transparent fable has to say about any of its themes

I'm usually careful with what I spoil in a review. This time requires a different approach. Proper analysis of Don't Worry Darling requires spoiling the twist. If that ruins the discussion, that's part of the problem.

So (deep breath): The Stepford Wives meets Vanilla Sky meets The Truman Show meets Pleasantville meets The Matrix meets Vivarium meets The Village meets The Handmaid's Tale meets Kevin Can F**k Himself meets WandaVision meets Desperate Housewives.

Do you see the problem here? We've seen this movie before, done better and with a sharper bite. Yes, we know our grandparents' gender roles were awful. Yes, we know nostalgia is poison. Yes, we know today's masculinity is in crisis, just not the one Jordan Peterson believes is happening. Yes, we know cults of personality never end well. Yes, we know women's liberation is in intensive care until we sort out this three-job economy we've fallen into. Don't Worry Darling resorts to precious, elaborate artistry to make the most obvious points about the clash between 21st-century feminism and 21st-century fascism. After making it through so many recycled bits from a dozen other stories, its only noteworthy reveal is that it has not a single original thought to offer.

Before you come at me screaming that nothing is new and everything is pastiche: I'm not faulting the movie for not having a unique concept; I'm faulting it for not exploring its concept from a unique perspective. What director Olivia Wilde seems to have to say about neoreactionary gurus is exactly what you can read in a Vox explainer, and the movie's stance on enforced domesticity goes no deeper than a Someecards meme.

To sum it up: In an isolated company town made of pastel colors, perfectly mowed lawns and perpetual dinner parties, an entire generation of young couples follow a creepily choreographed routine of the hardworking breadwinner husband and the contented pretty-faced housewife. This is the 1950s not as they happened, but as online manchildren imagine them. Our protagonist, Alice Chambers, gradually follows the clues until she learns that her picture-perfect life is built on staggering cruelty and hypocrisy: the entire town is a digital simulation her husband trapped her in because he felt emasculated in his joblessness and listened to one too many manosphere podcasts.

That's what happens. But what does it mean, beyond what it plainly says? Did Wilde really cast two of the world's biggest male sex icons and hire the cinematographer of Black Swan, an editor from True Detective and the composer of Happy Feet to say what amounts to "There are bad men who do bad things"?

This is a movie about a society ruled by men, but most of the men in the story (apart from the perfectly cast cult leader Frank) don't rise above a plot device function. In particular, discussion about Don't Worry Darling has obsessed over the underdeveloped acting skills of singer Harry Styles. The most charitable explanation for this impression is that the role Styles is playing is not actually Jack the 1950s patriarch, but Jack the 2020s loser who cosplays as a 1950s patriarch. But even under that interpretation, the movie still falls short of its potential. The anxious pursuit of substitute fatherly validation from a tyrannical CEO sparks obvious homoerotic questions the movie doesn't seem aware of. The husbands of the town jump to be noticed by Frank like they're schoolgirls at a Beatles concert. When Jack is promoted at work and Frank awards him a golden ring, the scene is acted and shot like a betrothal.

Unfortunately, any exploration of how patriarchy also traps men would have been too much nuance for this movie. It correctly identifies Jack as the villain who victimized Alice, but it flees in panic from the complexity that would result if it looked more closely at Frank's victimization of Jack. Likewise, we don't learn whether Wilde's character dragged her husband into her fantasy or he is in on the lie. Either answer would open a trail of discussion the movie is not equipped to confront.

You know a story needs reworking when the merely suggested possibilities are more attractive than the events you do get to see. There were many ways the false 1950s town could have been framed as commentary on America's delusions about itself, and the digital simulation is among the least interesting ones. If, for example, the town had been a physical location in the real world, blocked off from modern society, one could interpret the story to allude to conservative America's obsession with exceptionality and fear of openness. Jack's constant warnings to Alice that their idyllic lives could crumble down if she doesn't go along with the script could resonate with the manosphere's accusation that feminist activists ruined the good old days. The bizarre scene where Jack dances under Frank's commands could represent the rat race that corporate power has imposed on ordinary people. There could even have been an opportunity to draw parallels between the town's self-image as a chosen people and the Puritan colonies that gave the country its identity.

But that's not the movie we got. What we got is a skin-deep grasp of metaphor and a parade of confusing hallucinations that don't contribute to telling the story. What we got is a reliably predictable thriller that pretends to not know we've seen all the movies it's imitating. What we got is an accidentally ungrammatical title that creates a fascinating but unexplored ambiguity (without the comma, the "Darling" in Don't Worry Darling could be read in the vocative, as the man telling the woman "You, darling, should not worry," or in the accusative, as the woman being warned "Don't worry him"). What we got is the bare minimum of feminist theory dressed up as if it were a life-changing revelation.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +3 for Chris Pine's acting, +3 for gorgeous cinematography.

Penalties: −1 because it's excessively derivative, −1 because it's excessively heavy-handed, −1 because it falls into the trap of finding an individual solution to a collective problem, −1 because it relies too heavily on symbols that don't have meaning, −1 because any critique of 1950s patriarchy is incomplete without addressing 1950s racism and 1950s queerphobia, −1 because it doesn't develop the briefly portrayed issue of women who willingly support the systems that oppress them, −1 because the assorted events that pile up toward the ending make no sense.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

CYBERPUNK REVISITED: Strange Days (1995)

Dossier: Bigelow, Kathryn, Strange Days (Twentieth Century Fox, 1995).

Filetype: Film.

File Under: Cyberpunk derivative (strong).

Executive Summary: Strange Days takes place in Los Angeles on the eve of Y2K (insert joke here). Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) is an ex-cop (booted off the force for some unclear reason) who now peddles virtual reality “jack tapes” (actually minidiscs) in Hollywood nightclubs. In his off time he watches “tapes” he made himself while he was together with Faith (Juliette Lewis). Problem is, some ill shit is going down--the murder of rapper and anti-LAPD activist Jeriko One (Glenn Plumber) is all over the news, and Nero intuits a connection to Jeriko’s producer, who happens to be Faith’s sketchy new boyfriend, Philo Gant (Michael Wincott)--a connection that may endanger his beloved Faith. So he recruits ass-kicking limo driver “Mace” (Angela Basset) and schlubby private eye Max Peltier (Tom Sizemore) to follow down a dark trail of murder, conspiracy and betrayal, hoping to find the killer before the city explodes.

High-Tech: Most of the technology in Strange Days comes straight out of the mid-1990s--CRT televisions, landlines, minidiscs, cars with oval windows, etc. The one difference is that, instead of crack and heroin, people looking to get high attach a “squid” (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) to their head and play “tapes” of other people’s (or one’s own) experiences recorded with said squid. Like the simstim technology in Neuromancer (from which the concept is lifted wholesale), the viewer enjoys the full sensory experience of the recorder. However, do it too much and your brain gets fried, man.  

Low-Life: As mentioned above, Nero is a small time “jack” peddler, and is pretty much resented, despised or condescended to by everyone else in the film. Despite having once been a cop, Nero isn’t a tough guy, so he uses quick wits and a quicker tongue to save his ass from getting beat down. And the threat is near-constant--Hollywood in Strange Days is pretty much like the real Hollywood, in the sense of being grimy and crime-ridden, only amplified--there’s even a scene where Santa gets mugged. (Santa! Can you imagine that? Oh the humanity!) Plus most of the film takes place in seedy Hollywood’s even-seedier underbelly--nightclubs, strip clubs, dive bars, run-down apartment buildings, trash-strewn alleys and so forth. So yeah--we’re securely in neonoir territory here.

Dark Times: In real life, after the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King by members of the LAPD and the rioting that occurred in the aftermath of the officers' acquittal, the LAPD and city authorities enacted a series of reforms, began engaging more with local and civic leaders and worked to soften their approach and image. Though there are still lots of ongoing problems, I think most Angelenos would agree that community relations have gotten a lot better since hitting rock bottom in 1992. The Los Angeles depicted in Strange Days, by contrast, is one in which the LAPD and city authorities took the opposite message from the riots, and doubled-down on heavy-handed repression. There are near constant images of riot police beating the crap out of random people. And since people have had it, there are also near constant images of shit on fire.

Legacy: Strange Days is probably one of the better examples of virtual reality in film, but since there hasn’t exactly been a cavalcade of VR-themed films since, it’s hard to consider this as much of a legacy. It is currently streaming on Netflix, however. So there’s that.

In Retrospective: Smart people like Roger Ebert really liked Strange Days when it was released in 1995, but it has not aged well--only, not for the reasons you might think. The day-to-day technology, though outdated (even for 1999), isn’t obtrusive, and the “squid” is handled pretty well. Actually, the POV scenes are among the best in the film.

The problem is that the rest of the film itself is just, well, not very good, and the ways in which goes about being not very good aren’t funny or lovable the way they are in, say, The Warriors. Feinnes, for one, is bizarrely miscast as the streetwise hustler. In fact, he is so thoroughly unconvincing in the role that it’s hard to remember that he's a generally well-respected actor. Tom Sizemore is more predictably cringeworthy, especially with the Pearl Jam fright wig. However, neither quite plumbs the depths like Juliette Lewis, whose stilted delivery, poor timing and highly irritating character portrayal manages to be both drab and grating at the same time. And her band! If you ever needed proof that the 1990s were much less cool than you remember, this is it.

Speaking of, Strange Days also features the prerequisite cheesy 90s faux-rave. Only this one turns out to be a...grunge rave. Yes, a grunge rave. With Juliette Lewis’ shitty band playing knock-off grunge that’s orders of magnitude worse than the knock-off grunge featured in that one episode of Street Sharks . Come to think of it, why didn’t I just watch Street Sharks instead of this crap? Now that's some 90s culture I can get behind...

Analytics

For its time: 3/5
Watched today: 1/5
Cybercoefficient: 4/10


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POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator (2012).