Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Blame the Kids

What if the young people staring into their phones are not damaged versions of us? What if they are simply becoming people suited to a world different from the one that made us?

I started watching Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die and lasted about twenty minutes. This is therefore not a review of the film. Perhaps the remaining two hours complicate everything that irritated me about its opening. Perhaps somewhere around the ninety-minute mark Sam Rockwell turns to camera and delivers an eloquent defence of TikTok. I wouldn’t know. I stopped because the film was radiating what I can only describe as hysterical boomer energy: phones are destroying everyone, young people are vacant, nobody communicates any more, reality is disappearing and civilisation appears to be approximately three notifications away from collapse.

The strange thing is that this comes from Gore Verbinski, a filmmaker who has spent much of his career making extravagantly technological entertainment. Verbinski directed The Ring, Rango and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, written by Matthew Robinson, is his first feature since A Cure for Wellness in 2016. Sam Rockwell plays a man who claims to have travelled from an AI-dominated future and arrives in a Los Angeles diner looking for people who can help him prevent it. The film turns phones, virtual worlds, artificial intelligence and technological dependency into parts of the same approaching catastrophe. (Roger Ebert)

The generational element is not accidental. Robinson has said that his dream would be for thirteen-year-olds to watch the film, decide phones are uncool and throw them away. That is certainly an ambition. It also reveals something interesting about the assumptions beneath the story. The phone is imagined as an external contaminant. Remove it and perhaps the young person underneath can return to something more authentic. (Ars Technica)

But return to what?