The film for teens that hates teens

So far, so moral panic. Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski’s new film Good Luck. Have Fun. Don’t Die is essentially an adaptation of The Anxious Generation as an extended episode of the cartoon series Rick and Morty. It is a sugar rush of apocalypse, on-the-nose satire and action sequences as gameplay, maddening in its lack of control and sometimes just plain mad. 

Sam Rockwell plays a man from the future who appears in a diner one night and tells the assembled slice of America that he has come to that same diner a Groundhog Day number of times and will once more be recruiting a team to help him stop the coming apocalypse, which is a mixture of Wall-E and The Matrix. Oh, and if anyone has any fancy ideas,  there’s a bomb strapped to him.  

In between the running and jumping and endless gagging – the joke-kind, not the nausea, although the effect of one may cause the other – we get the backstories of some of the team who join up. A pair of teachers (Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña) survive a zombie attack of teenagers attached to their phones when one has the temerity to suggest they read a book. 

A mother (Juno Temple) is offered a clone of her son after he’s killed in a school shooting. “Is this your first time?” she’s asked by a group of concerned mothers who’ve stepped out of the Stepford Wives. 

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And there’s a party entertainer (Haley Lu Richardson) dressed as a princess who is allergic to mobiles and wi-fi – “That’s like being allergic to air,” someone usefully remarks – has lost her true love to a virtual reality game.

The oddest thing is that this is a film whose appeal seems to be firmly aimed at teenagers. The satire is snark and cultural references galore; the direction is as animated as you’d expect from a director whose best film is Rango, and the plot dynamics ape a video game, complete with final boss. So how come a film so geared to the teenagers so despises its audience?

The whole film is yelling “touch grass” and as such its creators poke a judgmental finger at the mote in the eyes of the kids while ignoring the digital planks in their own eyes. The problem with social media and the internet isn’t the generations who are abutting the end of the alphabet but those that came before, the boomers and those like myself: Generation X. 

We are the old fucks who won’t put their phones down; whose postmodernism lives in a brain that can still remember postal orders. We populate Facebook; are the only ones left on X and have email addresses with our actual names because they weren’t all used up yet. 

We aren’t really concerned about the kids. It just gives us something to post about, to doomscroll over and in the process absolve ourselves. The kids are screwed, we tweet with a hyperlink to Johann Hari’s pile of shit book Stolen Focus. 

Steven Spielberg’s AI is also referenced by Verbinski’s film, though it also recalls Spielberg’s weirdly ephemeral Ready Player One. That was a movie which managed to gross over half a billion dollars without leaving any discernible trace on the communal psyche of anyone who saw it. There was a race in it, I think. And I want to say it had scenes inside The Shining’s hotel?

Part of the problem is exactly this. Spielberg is the never-ending teenager. So when he makes a film for teenagers, he makes it about himself. His teenagers of the future geek out about The Shining and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It’s solipsism with dad jeans.  

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Which is also to say I quite enjoyed Good Luck. Have Fun. Don’t Die. It’s not good, I’m from being Generation X – we were the kids that separated notions of value from evaluation. We watched Neighbours when we were too conked out from reading Baudrillard. The film thinks it’s clever and too cool for school, without realising that anyone who says that phrase definitively isn’t. 

So now I watch Rick and Morty, and obviously side with Rick, the smart, amoral time-travelling grandpa and, jokily, refer to TikTok as TokTik because dad. So we use a disdain we haven’t earned on teenagers who don’t deserve it, as we ignore the fact that the kids are vastly more savvy than we are when it comes to technology. And that they might have something to teach us, if we’d only put our phones down and listen to them.   

John Bleasdale’s novel Connery, about the life of Sean Connery, is published by Plumeria