Entertainment
New Sci-Fi Thriller Is Like A Choose Your Own Adventure Where All Options Are Selected
By Chris Sawin
| Published
Norm’s Diner. Los Angeles. 10:10 pm. A bearded man (Sam Rockwell), covered head-to-toe in a clear pancho and tangled with tubes, wires, motherboards, and a bomb detonator, stomps into the diner. He takes bites from a few unsuspecting people’s entrees before exclaiming, “I’m from the future, and everything is about to go horribly, horribly wrong!”
Claiming to have returned to this precise diner at this exact moment 117 times previously, this man from the future is looking for volunteers. Half of humanity perishes in the future, while the other half becomes hopelessly obsessed with their phones and social media. A.I. has finally taken over the world, and this man knows the secret to saving it, and it all has to be done on this very night.
“Like a choose-your-own-adventure book where all the options have been selected.”
With more than a little convincing, seven volunteers go on a mission to save humanity’s future. Some will knowingly not make it until the end of the night, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die dives into the backstory of a few of these diner patrons who no longer have anything to lose.
Mark (Michael Pena) and Janet (Zazie Beetz) are a romantic couple and both teachers, on the rocks. Mark is a substitute teacher who lands a job at the same school where Janet teaches. The problem is that teachers at this school keep disappearing while the students never get off their phones. Mark questions this and accidentally touches one of the students’ phones, which doesn’t end well for anyone.
Susan (Juno Temple) is the mother of a high school student named Darren (Riccardo Drayton). Darren dies unexpectedly after falling victim to a mass shooting, and Ingrid’s life loses all meaning. She’s introduced to a store that clones mass shooting victims, but the clone’s flaws keep their nearly flawless physical appearance from feeling authentic.
Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) has lived her whole life with an allergy to wifi and cell phones. Doctors said it wasn’t a real disease, but she gets nosebleeds and can’t function properly whenever she’s around technology or basically goes anywhere outside of the house. Ingrid met a pizza delivery driver named Tim (Tom Taylor), who didn’t believe in using cell phones or having any attachment to technology. The two moved in together and lived a frugal yet content life until one day, when a VR headset was left on their doorstep for Tim. Tim becomes so obsessed with virtual reality that he prefers it to this one, even though the so-called love of his life isn’t in it.
“A.I. is inescapable, and humanity’s only choice is to try to cater to its good side.”
Gore Verbinski has never shied away from going super weird in his previous films, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die takes the bizarre cake. The film is defined as a sci-fi action-adventure comedy, but its humor is perhaps the most unusual aspect. The film’s grasp of how social media and A.I. have a death grip on society is terrifying, given how much we rely on and are addicted to them today. There’s a dark, erratic tone to the film’s comedy that is amusing because it comes off as almost genuine. The biggest takeaway is that A.I. is inescapable, and humanity’s only choice is to try to cater to its good side.
Sam Rockwell has the commanding presence of a man who partially gives a shit. He intends to save everyone he can, but the people in this diner are expendable. If it doesn’t work out, he’s the only one who can hit the reset button and start over. So some of his actions may seem cruel on the surface, but he also knows everyone at this point almost as well as they know themselves. Rockwell is as scene-stealing as ever here, but half of his charm is how he bounces off the rest of the talented and mesmerizing ensemble.
It’s also interesting to witness how every volunteer reacts to the upcoming apocalypse. Mark and Janet are filled with panic, an Uber driver named Scott (Asim Chaudhry) doubts that this “Man from the Future” and anything he says is actually true, a scoutmaster named Bob (Daniel Barnett) volunteers solely with the intention of being a hero, Ingrid has a strange sense of acceptance, and Susan is cooperative but has an ulterior motive.
Even the characters that die along the way are a form of loss. Sam Rockwell’s “Man from the Future” is shoehorned into this representation of hope. He wants to save humanity, but he also wants to get to the point where he doesn’t have to repeat this night again for the 118th time and beyond. He watches everyone die, and everything crumbles around him. This is purgatory for him; he is basically Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. He is a symbol of hope, but also broken in his own way. Panic, doubt, heroism, acceptance, conniving, loss, and hope; it’s like the seven stages of grief but somehow more futile.
“Worth seeing for its exceptional performances, its catawampus narrative, and its hopelessly hopeless take on a dystopian future.”
The story takes wildly peculiar turns, even for a film where the future is determined, but how it gets there is a question mark. There is a CGI creature buried within the second half of the film that has an absolutely gonzo design and also puts full-frontal nudity to insane use. The movie’s nonlinear storytelling is all over the place, but where the film takes the audience isn’t entirely unexpected. Visually, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a bananas smorgasbord and a shotgun blast to the face of craziness. But narratively, it feels like the film is deeper or more unique than it actually is.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is like a choose-your-own-adventure book where all the options have been selected, and all the different scenarios are playing out at once in the same timeline. The film is worth seeing for its exceptional performances, its catawampus narrative, and its hopelessly hopeless take on a dystopian future. The lack of actual laughs and the inability to fully satisfy what it introduces are what hinder Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die from being a pure, unhinged masterpiece.
GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE REVIEW SCORE
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is now playing in theaters.
Entertainment
Creative Assembly drops first look at the Alien: Isolation sequel
Twelve years after the original Alien: Isolation game was released across platforms, on the official “Alien Day” meant to celebrate the beloved franchise, game developers Creative Assembly are returning to the world of xenomorphs and unreliable robots to once again terrify the living daylights out of us.
The teaser trailer, aptly titled “False Sense of Security,” does a lot with very little, from the flashing red light in a poorly lit room to the ominous background music and eventual close-up of what looks to be a payphone, with the word “Emergency” appropriately backlit.
As you might expect from the makers of the original game, Creative Assembly is clearly reluctant to over-share, relying on atmosphere and sound to do the heavy lifting, but the brief glimpse we get of the background when the door opens suggests the possibility that, unlike the first game, the sequel might also take place on a planet’s surface, perhaps hinting at a much larger game world.
Needless to say, we’ll be covering more details about the game’s development and progress as they emerge.
Entertainment
YouTube is prompting users to enable watch history. Heres the workaround.
Before AI became the defining buzzword of the 21st century, algorithms held that crown. And frankly, algorithmic recommendations have always kind of sucked. YouTube, in particular, has long been criticized for serving up low-quality content — and more troublingly, for functioning as a gateway to right-wing rabbit holes.
The best workaround has always been simple: pause your YouTube watch history. Without it running, your recommendations pull from your likes, saved videos, and subscriptions — not from that one iceberg video you clicked at 2 a.m. that suddenly has the algorithm convinced you want an endless stream of “SJW owned” compilations.
That fix, however, appears to be breaking down. Last week, a wave of YouTube users reported that with watch history paused, the platform has stopped serving homepage recommendations entirely — replacing their feeds with a prompt to re-enable watch history so YouTube can “populate” it.
Credit: Mashable screenshot / YouTube
The issue isn’t universal. Users who recently paused their history still see recommendations, likely because YouTube has enough residual data to work with. The problem is hitting hardest for users who have kept watch history off for years — a group that, until now, had no issues. For the record, this writer has had watch history paused since 2017 without a single problem — until now, apparently.
Mashable Light Speed
This change hasn’t gone down well, with many taking to Reddit to voice their complaints. “I’ve had my watch history off since 2013. Why is this suddenly a requirement? Maliciously incompetent company,” says the top comment on one Reddit thread. Another commentor states, “Haven’t had watch history on for 9 years. Now they’re forcing me to turn it on to get recommended what they recommend me on my PC even though the reason they stated they cant recommend anything is because I don’t have watch history on??? Makes no sense and its almost blatant.”
While this isn’t the first time YouTube has nudged users toward enabling tracking, some see this latest move as a more aggressive push to harvest search histories for ad targeting. There’s also a legitimate question worth asking: why does YouTube suddenly need watch history to generate homepage recommendations when it had been doing exactly that for years without it?
Mashable reached out to YouTube with questions about the change and had not received a response by publication time.
Users have already found a workaround. Re-enable your watch history, refresh the page, then immediately pause it again. Your homepage recommendations should repopulate. To access the page to re-pause, head to Settings, click “View or change your Google Account settings,” navigate to Data & Privacy, and toggle off YouTube history.
Entertainment
Star Wars' Most Hated Plot Hole Actually Makes Perfect Sense
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Do you know what happens when Star Wars fans get together? If you said “embarrassing things,” you’re correct, but I meant more specifically. After a few conversations and a few beers (or maybe spiked blue milks), everyone starts dishing on their favorite franchise plot holes. These are supposedly narrative mistakes that make this famous galaxy far, far away feel that much less immersive. Incidentally, the one “plot hole” that comes up most frequently in these discussions is the idea that Order 66 should have killed more Jedi than it actually did.
In the Original Trilogy, we are introduced to the idea that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda are the last Jedi in the galaxy. But the prequels, sequels, and an entire universe of tie-in books, comics, and games have increasingly introduced more Jedi characters that survived Emperor Palpatine’s galactic purge of these laser sword-wielding do-gooders. However, as usual, the fandom is griping for no good reason because, based on the sheer onscreen incompetence of Palpatine and his clones, it’s a miracle that more Jedi didn’t survive this sloppy attempt at mass murder.
The Stupidest Order In The Galaxy
The Star Wars movies A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back presented Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda as the only surviving Jedi. Of course, Kenobi didn’t give too many granular details as to how the Jedi died. All he told young Luke Skywalker in that first movie is that Darth Vader “helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights.… now, the Jedi are all but extinct.” Nobody really questioned this because we had no idea how many Jedi there were to begin with. Plus, it was easy enough to imagine the most powerful guy in the galaxy using all of a vast, galaxy-spanning Empire’s resources to hunt and kill a bunch of hippie space wizards.
But in Revenge of the Sith, we see how it all went down. Palpatine had a hidden command secretly installed in the brains of all the clones who were fighting side-by-side with the Jedi during the Clone Wars. Once the Emperor commanded them to “Execute Order 66,” all of the clones stopped what they were doing to immediately kill the closest Jedi. In a montage of bleak scenes, we see how sudden surprise blaster fire was enough to kill even Jedi Masters like Ki-Adi Mundi, Plo Koon, and Aayla Secura.
Holo Pursuits
At the time, it made a kind of morbid sense. We had previously seen how Jedi like Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi could deflect a handful of blaster bolts, so it seemed reasonable to believe they couldn’t survive if a small army fired on them all at once. However, some of the clones were downright sloppy with their execution attempts. Because of their methods and the whole design of Palpatine’s harebrained scheme, it was basically inevitable that countless warriors would survive this attempted purge. This would explain why popular Jedi like Kanan Jarrus, Ahsoka Tano, Cal Kestis, and even Grogu survived Order 66.
When you re-watch Revenge of the Sith, notice how sloppy the Clone Troopers are. Cody basically fires one shot at Obi-Wan Kenobi and assumes falling into the water will be enough to kill the guy who can take on entire droid armies by himself. The handful of clones who try to kill Yoda somehow forget that he can sense their intent through the Force. Even some of the successful kills are sloppy. Like, sure, y’all blew Plo Koon out of the sky, but other Jedi flying starships could likely hyperspace to safety (yes, they’d have to get to a hyperspace ring first, you can stop writing that comment).
When The Sith Go Marching In
My theory is simple: assuming other Jedi were in similar situations throughout the galaxy, quite a few Jedi would survive Order 66. If the Clone Troopers tried to fire on other warriors who were very far away (like Obi-Wan), the targeted Jedi would likely escape. If other clones tried to sneak up on Jedi in non-combat situations (like with Yoda), these Force users would sense their intent and kill them out of self-defense. Furthermore, if there aren’t enough Clones around when the order goes through, a Jedi could survive, say, only three or four people trying to shoot him, much like Obi-Wan did when fighting Battle Droids throughout the prequels.
Long story not very short, the Emperor came up with a stupid plan and executed it in the sloppiest possible way. Plus, contrary to what Obi-Wan said in A New Hope, later Star Wars shows make it seem like Vader stopped personally hunting down Jedi and left that task to the Inquisitors. Whenever the Inquisitors fight someone other than a helpless child or scared former Padawan, they get their butts handed to them, as seen in everything from Star Wars Rebels to the Fallen Order and Survivor video games. Because Order 66 was done so poorly, and Palpatine’s brute squad sucked so hard, it’s no wonder so many Jedi survived the purge.
In retrospect, this makes sense, too. Palpatine is infamous among fans for his insane plans, which included playing the commander in chief of two different warring armies so he could land the job of “mutilated president for life.” It’s only because of (let’s face it) bad writing on George Lucas’ part that any of the Emperor’s plans ever succeed. Order 66 was so utterly stupid and handled so poorly that it guaranteed plenty of Jedi survivors. But what else would you expect from someone who spent all his Empire’s credits on a space station that’s so easy to blow up … twice!
Nelly Korda posts another 65, builds major lead at Chevron
Cardinals draft Miami QB Carson Beck to open third round
