Genre: Sci-fi/Wackalicious
Premise: A man who says he’s from the future shows up at a diner claiming he needs to recruit a team to help him save humanity from implosion.
About: I will always check out what Gore Verbinski is doing. He has very eclectic taste. And while nothing of his non-Hollywood lineup is great, it’s always interesting. This movie from Verbinski stars Sam Rockwell (White Lotus) and Juno Temple (Ted Lasso). It is written by Matthew Robinson, who co-wrote the Brian Duffield movie, Love and Monsters. It’s a little unclear when it’s coming out but it’s already been shot and went through post so it should be soon.
Writer: Matthew Robinson
Details: 124 pages
I like cookies.
You give me any cookie, I will eat that cookie. I will even eat cookies that I don’t like. I don’t like those really dry Christmas pinwheel cookies. I think they are disgusting. But if you put those in front of me, I will eat them. That’s how much I like cookies.
But you know what kind of cookie I won’t eat? I won’t eat a cookie with cookie dough on top of it. Just as I won’t give a good rating to a high concept screenplay with more high concepts stacked on top of it. Which is what we get today.
Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die begins with a man from the future, or so he claims, bursting into a Norm’s Diner at night. Norm’s is a diner chain relic of the 1970s here in Los Angeles. The man immediately starts yelling at all of the 40+ customers and workers in the establishment.
He tells them that he’s from the future. And, in the future, mankind is destroyed. It all started with morning social media time. It’s what humanity did to start their day. But that time on their phone before they got out of bed started extending… and extending… and extending until nobody did anything anymore.
This allowed AI to rise up and eliminate a lazy, unsuspecting populace. Future Man claims he has traced the saving of mankind back to this Norm’s diner. He’s actually been here 100 times before to collect the bravest combination of people to execute a task that will save the world.
Each time, he picks a different group of people and they attempt to accomplish the mission. Except every single time they’ve all been killed. As he’s explaining this, a bunch of cops show up outside. Future Man warns everyone that if they try to flee, he has a bomb on him that he’ll detonate.
After a lot of back and forth, six people agree to help Future Man accomplish his mission. As they try to escape the diner to start their mission, we begin a series of flashbacks where we meet each of our group members before this day. And… let’s just say this is where things get weird.
A school teacher named Mark becomes convinced that all of his students are being manipulated by their phones and want to kill him. He eventually has to flee the school or be slaughtered. Then you have Susan, whose son is killed during a school shooting and she’s approached by people who say they can clone him. Twenty minutes later, she has her son back. Except her cloned son has an add-on that makes him deliver verbal ads to his mother every hour for stuff that his mom might like.
You then have Ingrid, who’s allergic to cell phones. We learn about her falling in love with another guy who’s allergic to cell phones and they end up living this perfect life out in the middle of nowhere with no internet. But then one day, her husband buys a VR set and becomes addicted to it and leaves Ingrid so he can live inside his VR world full time.
After each flashback, we cut forward to Future Man and his team getting closer to their destination: the home of a nine-year-old boy who creates an AI that takes over the world. Future Man explains that he has a thumb drive that will insert a fail-safe mechanism onto the AI before it spreads to the rest of the internet. It will ensure that AI never wants to harm human beings, therefore saving the future.
As everything and the kitchen sink is thrown at our gnarly group of characters, we are never completely sure whether Future Man is crazy or if all of what he’s saying is really true.
I call these scripts “Walking off the Reservation” scripts. It’s when you leave the land of the tried and true and venture off into the unknown.
Out here, in the unknown, amazing things can happen. You can come up with material that nobody’s ever seen before.
But what you have to realize is that the paths extending off the reservation are not as untraveled as you think. Just because you’ve never seen someone walk down this path doesn’t mean someone hasn’t walked down it. The very existence of a path means it’s been forged by the legs of another ambitious traveler.
Unlike successful movies, where screenwriters can trace each triumph and understand why it worked, the failures are far more difficult to document. Failed movies are forgotten mere weeks after their release. The problem with this is that many of these movies attempted to travel down these same paths, only to discover they lead nowhere. Which means writers aren’t learning that those choices don’t work.
This doesn’t even account for the hundreds of thousands (yes, I said “hundreds of thousands”) of screenplays that never went anywhere because they ventured down these paths as well, only to become lost in the vast wilderness of misguided story choices. You haven’t learned from their failures either.
My point is this: walking off the reservation is a dangerous high-wire act. The fact that a unique, mysterious path remains open is far less likely to mean you’ve discovered something magical and far more likely to mean it’s already been proven to lead nowhere. So tread with ambition. But also care.
Unfortunately, Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die treads recklessly. It wants to be the most unique script you’ve ever read. But nearly all of its choices end up feeling try-hard and unsatisfying. They’re wild, but they’re wild in that “something’s off here” way. I don’t know what to call it.
“Manufactured originality” maybe? You can feel the desperation to create the originality and it’s taking precedence over simply writing the best story.
But here’s where the script officially lost me. It’s actually a huge oversight. I don’t know why Verbinski didn’t flag it.
The premise is predicated on this idea of: Is Future Man telling the truth or not? Is he really from the future or is he just some crazy homeless guy? Are we living in a normal, boring, everyday world or are we living in a reality that allows for time travel and science fiction?
Well, the second we flash back to one of the group members, we get that answer. The moment you tell us the high school kids are robots being controlled by secret messages on their phones, you’ve admitted that we are living in a science fiction reality. So I no longer care about the question of, “Is Future Man real or just a crazy homeless dude?”
It’d be like making Safety Not Guaranteed and, in the middle of the movie, cutting to a ten-minute sequence of our main character (the one who claims he’s a time traveler) in the future. You’ve stepped on the mystery driving your whole story. I have no idea why they did that here.
It pains me to give this script a “wasn’t for me.” I genuinely admire ambitious scripts. I appreciate when writers take big risks. But with big risks comes big responsibility. When you’re writing something that doesn’t fall into a clearly polished template, the burden falls on you to meticulously refine all the unconventional material you’re introducing. If it feels even slightly sloppy, that sloppiness will be magnified precisely because it exists under the unforgiving spotlight of innovation.
There’s simply too much going on here. The writer tried to do everything and then some. If we would’ve had the Future Man storyline combined with more grounded backstories for each of the group members, that would’ve worked much better.
Script Link: Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful about using your zany tone as a shield against having to abide by real-world logic in your storytelling. A major conceit we’re asked to accept here is that the police outside of Norm’s will kill everyone inside if they attempt to escape. The writer is trying to create a scenario where they’re all trapped, where everyone dies if they don’t help Future Man complete his mission. But that’s not how police operate in the real world. Even if everyone bolted outside at once, the police aren’t simply going to open fire and massacre them all. The writer would likely defend this by saying, “It’s not the kind of movie where cops behave normally. It operates in a different register, a more heightened, comedic reality.” Here’s the problem: when you construct storylines where people act in direct opposition to how they would behave in reality, especially when lethal force is involved, most audiences won’t follow you down that path. Be a stronger writer and devise a more plausible explanation for why the cops would attack. Movies like The Matrix had to solve this exact problem. They had to construct believable justifications for why it was acceptable for Neo to gun down 300 people. I’m not claiming they arrived at the perfect solution, but they invested the effort and ensured it made enough sense that we wouldn’t question it.
