resistance

If you’re reading this review of Gore Verbinski’s maniacal farce “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” in newsprint, congratulations on being a Luddite.

But if you’re reading it on a smartphone, then you’re one of the suckers that Sam Rockwell is hoping to reach when his unnamed time traveler barges into a late-night Los Angeles diner screaming, “I am from the future and all of this goes horribly wrong!” The patrons pause scrolling to glance at this unhinged, unwashed man wearing a crown of computer wires wrapped around his head like an IT messiah. Then they get a good look at his shoes when he stomps on their tables, kicking cheeseburgers as he tries to make these regular folks engage with the tech-pocalypse he swears is coming.

It’s a sermon we’ve heard plenty of times before and possibly even delivered ourselves. Coming from the ever-charismatic Rockwell, a lecture to stop wasting our lives online sounds no more insurmountable, only more immediate.

Half of the world will die, he foretells. The other half will be too distracted to notice. That is, unless a handful of strangers join him right now, right this moment, to fight for humanity’s cerebral freedom. Unsurprisingly, volunteers don’t raise their hands. (The one eager guy who does has failed him too often in other scenarios.) But Rockwell’s time traveler — he really is one — is used to a firewall of resistance. He’s given this speech at this diner 117 times. Some combination of the 47 people in it is fated to succeed.

That opening scene sounds as if an AI merged “The Terminator” with “Groundhog Day.” True, Matthew Robinson’s funny, savage and surprising script doesn’t downplay its inspirations. (He even lets Rockwell rip off Indiana Jones’ line about snakes.) But the screenplay gets so intricate and angry — and so shamelessly ambitious — you can’t believe someone in today’s Hollywood was willing to put up the money to get it made. Even helmed by proven hitmaker Verbinski of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, it’s a feat akin to convincing someone to fund a skyscraper-sized cuckoo clock that has a bird that pops out and heckles the crowd.

Eventually, a dubious crew enlists: public school teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), grouchy ride-share driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), assistant Boy Scout leader Bob (Daniel Barnett), jittery mom Susan (Juno Temple) and forlorn Maria (Georgia Goodman), who keeps sighing that all she wanted was a slice of pie. Rockwell also impulsively yokes in Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a grungy girl in a princess dress, who seems to be on her own suicide mission. The actors are mostly just pegs in a complicated plot, but they snap into place well.

The man from the future doesn’t have a plan — and worse, he considers himself the only person who isn’t expendable. The others can die (and do). As the group shuffles toward catastrophe, Verbinski intercuts their mission with flashbacks to their civilian lives. Their ordinary days, the digital indignities they’ve borne, that’s where Verbinski really gets mean.

The film’s feints and twists are fabulous as they explore how the internet’s promise has soured. One plotline involves a corporate brainstorm to make people love and nurture their own talking adbot, essentially a human-sized Tamagotchi. In another, school shootings have become such an epidemic that when Temple’s Susan gets summoned to identify her ninth-grader’s corpse, the other grieving mothers at the station calmly chitchat about traffic until one glances over at her nonchalantly and says, “First time?”

At first, the not-so-original idea that phones have turned children into zombies is a Romero-style parody of brain rot. (The young actor Cassiel Eatock-Winnik has a great scene as a vicious teen who stares down one of her elders and says, “You’re 35? That’s, like, older than most trees.”) But Verbinski reveals an unexpected angle of attack: Here, society has groomed the next generation to behave like machines. We don’t know why, exactly, but we can imagine a few reasons.

Even coping mechanisms take fire. Susan meets more parents who’ve snapped under the strain and become nihilistic trolls raising their daughter to be toxic so it won’t matter as much if she dies. Another character is quick to insist that everything he’s looking at — the walls, the people — is a facade. A 20-something gig worker named Tim (Tom Taylor) wants to permanently live in a VR simulation. His story is a little rushed but we get the idea that Tim’s not a jerk, just an idealist who can’t handle the tawdriness of the 21st century. As he puts it, “Why would I choose this world over that one?”

Verbinski doesn’t say much outright about the creeping concern that we’re living in a highly surveilled, aggressive and unpredictable police state. He’s able to make that point without words when cops arrive and our heroes-slash-hostages, none of whom have yet done anything worse than skip out on their bill, all assume the itchy trigger finger of the law will shoot them on sight. (And they’re right.) He also makes an ominous refrain of “Thank you for your service.”

It’s easier to howl at a classic like “Dr. Strangelove,” which mocked the leaders giddyuping the planet’s destruction, than at a present-day satire where we ourselves are the joke. As with “Idiocracy” (and eventually “Eddington”), our ability to fully appreciate this merciless, furious comedy might take a decade of remove. Even then, though, I won’t like James Whitaker’s cinematography, which goes for a deliberate ugliness but just looks dishwater drab.

“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” anticipates the audience’s resistance. We do think for ourselves and so we scour the movie for flaws that will justify the urge to roll our eyes. For example: Why does Rockwell let some characters die and not others? Is the movie just as shallow as its j’accuse of us? Some quibbles get answered. Larger questions are left coyly unresolved so that we leave the theater uneasy.

There are so many overwhelming ideas in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” that, at over two hours, it does have the sense of a dissociative doomscroll. There’s even a plot point involving an algorithmic overlord that creates randomly generated armies: “Ghostbusters” with AI slop. The normie survivors try to convince themselves it might send something good, like they’re thumbing TikTok hoping for a treasure worth the time. Rockwell assures them it won’t. Nothing good will ever come. And what does arrive is so hellacious that it makes the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man look sweet.

The film is too cynical to take itself that seriously; Verbinski would roll his eyes at any thoughts and prayers it could do much good. Yet, anyone born with “19” at the start of their birthyear still remembers how it felt to leave the house without a black rectangle in their hands. That makes us all time travelers of a sort, too, beacons of an increasingly distant era in which it was possible to be unplugged.

But it’s OK if you’re on your screen right now. Just sit before a bigger one to see this film.

Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas abroad, has spoken at the Al Jazeera Forum on the rights of Palestinians to resist occupation. The political leader says the demand of disarmament is unacceptable.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed this month in Minnesota. Silverio Villegas González was shot and killed in September in a Chicago suburb. Keith Porter Jr. was gunned down on New Year’s Eve in front of the Northridge apartment building where he lived.

All of them were slain by ICE agents.

In the past few months alone, America has repeatedly witnessed — from multiple angles and at varying playback speeds — groups of aggressive, twitchy, masked men conduct immigration sweeps on the order of President Trump and his Department of Homeland Security. The scenes are the stuff of nightmares, and even villainy.

After agent Jonathan Ross shot legal observer Good three times, including once in the head, he mumbled the expletives “f— b—” as her SUV drifted into a light post. Two weeks later, at least one ICE agent was seen clapping after Pretti was shot multiple times as he lay pinned on the ground.

If the intention of the Stephen Miller-run White House was to crush the resistance with violence, it has backfired. The number of protests in cities around the nation has grown in size and frequency. And local networks that offer instruction and training for how to legally observe ICE raids are proliferating by the day. In short, as ICE has ramped up its operations, so too has the resistance.

Now, a consortium of various civil rights and advocacy groups is calling for the largest anti-ICE demonstration to date, a national shutdown. “The people of the Twin Cities have shown the way for the whole country — to stop ICE’s reign of terror, we need to SHUT IT DOWN,” reads nationalshutdown.org. “On Friday, January 30, join a nationwide day of no school, no work and no shopping.”

Given the sense of urgency triggered by the invasive and deadly tactics of federal officers over the past few months, Friday’s planned shutdown could be huge. But unlike other major demonstrations, like the “No Kings” marches, it asks folks to take off work, school and stop shopping (yes, even online) in the name of democracy.

Taking time off work is not economically feasible for many Americans, especially given today’s affordability crisis (a concept that Trump believes was invented by Democrats). With that in mind, it may not be the most effective way to show solidarity with Minneapolis, Chicago, L.A. and other cities where a trip to Home Depot might include getting caught in an immigration raid. But it might be the safest option in an otherwise dangerously heated time, when peaceful protests are ending in violent killings.

We’ve been here before, even if the current images of killer goons in mismatched military gear might seem foreign and dystopian. Peaceful Civil Rights-era marches and protests often turned into bloody, brutal and murderous affairs, fueled by inhumane law enforcement tactics and vigilantes operating with impunity. But the majority of Americans — i.e. those who weren’t Black — didn’t see folks who looked like them slain by government agents who also looked like them. The naive notion that America protects its own has remained largely intact, until the current administration declared that anyone who’s not with them is against them.

Today, Washington’s on-high interpretation of Us and Them equals those who are pro-Trump (Us) and those who are not (Them). There are, of course, plenty of racist and bigoted caveats within that lunk-headed quotient, but generally, one side is dispensable while the other is not.

The Trump administration has characterized Pretti, who was carrying a concealed, permitted weapon at the time of his killing, as a domestic terrorist who essentially got what he deserved: “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It is that simple,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.

But when then-17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse shot three #BLM protesters, killing two, at a 2020 Kenosha, Wis., demonstration decrying police brutality, he was — and still is —canonized as a hero by Trump and the right.

Historical data shows that when 3.5% of a population is actively involved in peaceful, sustained resistance, they can influence significant political shifts. Those numbers likely don’t differentiate between who makes it out of the peaceful protest alive and who emerges as a martyr for the cause. But one shouldn’t have to choose between exercising their 1st Amendment rights and making it home alive.