Just don't do anything
dir: Gore Verbinski
2026
Rarely have I started watching a film and enjoyed it initially, and then had that enjoyment plummet so quickly and completely, as with this fucking flick.
I literally gasped at how rapidly it went terrible, but part of me wonders whether that was the actual point?
To anyone who’s watched movies over the last 40 years or so, almost every element of the film will be familiar, but its point isn’t just to plunder the back catalogue: it’s to make a heartfelt plea to the audience to not pre-emptively embrace AI in all its vile glory.
They know it’s a losing battle, because social media is too seductive and the average consumer (ie. American) is too lazy and thoughtless to see the techno-apocalypse that they are ushering in to existence. And the makers and extruders of entertainment products want to save time and money by not paying people and instead engaging slop generators to generate slop.
So maybe that’s why it’s not a coincidence that this script and many of the visuals feel like they were generated by a soulless sequence of algorithms and prompts that ‘borrowed’ all that it could from a myriad of other, better movies.
As I said earlier, it’s starts off okay. Sam Rockwell, even in something as misguided as this, is always a delight, or at least often a delight, and he delighted me here. Looking like a retro-futurist crazy homeless person (deliberately intended to recall Bruce Willis’ character from 12 Monkeys bursts into a diner called Norm’s, and starts haranguing the other diners. He tells them that he’s from the future, and that he needs the help of a number of them in order to prevent an AI from destroying the world.
He also mentions that he’s done this hundreds of times before, which presumably means he’s failed hundreds of times before. But he also knows all sorts of things about many of the diners, beyond their names and life stories (shades of Groundhog Day, which he actually namechecks in dialogue) and how quickly they die when they’ve tried to help him in the past.
I had no problem with any of that, initially. He chooses a bunch of people, and it’s only a few minutes later that I realised that most of the people he chose are actors I know.
Zazie Beetz, Michael Peña, Juno Temple, Hayley Lu Richardson, Asim Chaudry. All good people, probably They are meant to help whatever his name is save the world, by getting across town and inserting a drive into something before the AI becomes self-aware in a couple of hours’ time and dooms humanity. And yet this is the point where the movie really starts to fall apart.
The main reason is, much of the flick’s “meat” is in these flashbacks that occur for some, not all, of the people crazy future guy has assembled / yelled at. Each is meant to give them a back story, character development, some substance to them so they’re not just ciphers but also an illustration of how in this pre-apocalyptic world, technology has already conspired to enshittify their lives.
What actually happens, though, is that the screenwriter gets to run through a bunch of half-baked,, half-realised offcut Black Mirror premises that don’t even have endings or resolutions. And mostly they are terrible, and don’t explain what’s happening or really illuminate what they think they’re illuminating.
The first one, giving us a backstory (really it’s just a crappy vignette) for Janet and Mark, (Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña), both teachers at a local high school. What follows is a dumb story about how kids these days prefer looking at their phones than reading Anna Karenina.
It’s one of the laziest fucking things I’ve seen in my life. Unless it was meant to be bad tv on purpose, it ends up being like something you’d flick through back when cable tv was a thing, through whatever was on Disney Kids or Nickelodeon, and not stop on, because it looked too shitty.
If it was meant to be bad tv on purpose, congrats, human, you wrote something so bad an AI could have written it.
Now, I’ve read Anna Karenina. I’ve loved Anna Karenina. No sane teacher on the planet would try to teach it in a class. It’s 992 pages long. You’d never get through it. Not a single one of your students would read it over the course of the academic year.
But here it’s meant to make the audience, older people like me, look down on the youngs because they’d rather endlessly scroll through their phones instead of read a gargantuan classic of Russian literature.
Even if I buy that and tut tut along as intended, what happens in this section is, frankly, idiotic. The kids get some signal from their phone then start acting like zombies AND like they’re being controlled by a hive mind.
The harried teachers are chased around the place and, miraculously, are handed some retro space blasters which, for reasons, temporarily knocks out either the zombie teenagers or the whatever linking their phones through an ominous green triangle/pyramid.
What does it mean? Nothing. What happens when they regain individual consciousness? Nothing.
What does it mean in the context of what we were watching before and will be watching in future? Um… nothing good.
That one was baffling, but the next one actively hurt my heart and soul, and not in any good way.
During that school set flashback, there was mention made of a school shooting occurring at the school. We’re not shown it, it tonally doesn’t fit with the story at all, at fucking all, and yet it plays a major role in what follows.
I don’t like as a habit to spoil fundamental parts of movies that benefit from being watched unknown, going in, but it’s impossible to talk about this part without spoiling some pretty massive aspects.
Susan (Juno Temple), in her segment, comes to the school where the shooting occurred. Her son is one of the victims. She is devastated, but everyone else around her acts as if she stubbed her toe or lost her library card: just fill out this form and someone will see you shortly. People keep handing her cards with phone numbers on them. A toxic gaggle of “moms” insist that things will get easier real soon (minutes after her kid died), and invite her to a support group for all the parents who’ve lost their children to school shootings.
The joke is, obviously, on us, and when I say “us”, I don’t mean you or I because we’re not likely to be Americans. But the expected audience for this pic is Americans, because to Americans it’s meant to be confronting, bracing, caustic that school shootings are becoming so commonplace in the American consciousness that something like this would prick their conscience.
But all of that is lost the second they start bringing clones into it, in that the government subsidises a program that clones the murdered children and returns them in a sub-standard form, in that they look the same, but spout ads and have simplified character traits and none of their memories.
At the get together for “grieving” parents a couple talk a bunch of shit to Susan about how their daughter was killed four times in school shootings, and eventually for a laugh they had her “brought back” as a giant goofy racist.
I know there are people that could find this part funny, and I know it’s meant to be horrifying and funny at the same time, but it really didn’t resonate or make a lick of sense at all, and it’s compounded by the fact that someone hands Susan a bit of technology and says something like “here, do this voice’s bidding, and you’ll be able to get your “real” son back”.
More nonsense ensues, and the last vignette involves the best of the characters, being Ingrid (Hayley Lu Richardson, who is way better than this material warrants), who is profoundly allergic to technology, and has lived a very difficult like because of it.
The problem is – how does all this fit together? It’s fits together only one way. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that happens, hired killers turning up out of nowhere, a giant cat – centaur made up of cats, a pug, a big standoff, a resolution with seconds to spare (that lasts an eternity), a massive last minute twist, a satisfying ending, everyone is happy, all the kind of stuff that’s meant to be entertaining (more so in games rather than movies, though the structures aren’t that different).
But none of it is real even in the context of the heightened “new” reality, not even in the movie. The cake is a lie. The illusion is of choices mattering and actions making a difference, but nothing seems to be a choice. We have lost already, and there’s nothing we can do to escape, and nothing any of them can do to escape.
I’m okay with depressing messages in films, in fact I revel in them sometimes, being the perverse individual that I am, but this did not work or hang together at all for me. If it was meant to be a series of episodes in some anthology series as to Why Technology is Bad, they needed better individual resolutions, because none of this fleshes anything out, or makes any of these characters seem like anything other than an empty hologram.
Except Ingrid and the crazy guy, but I can’t go into why.
Sometimes movies have a lack of ideas. Some movies are bad because of an abundance of ideas that happen to be bad. This flick somehow combines the worst of both worlds, undermining itself, rendering itself pointless, by parodying AI slop in such a way that it resembles AI slop too completely to be seen as even satirical.
I did not enjoy this, or have fun, and in some ways death would have been preferable.
4 times I still like most of these actors despite this appalling outcome out of 10
--
“ If you come with me, there is a chance you will die tonight. If you don't, well it's game over for each and every person in this room, I promise you that. But tonight we got a shot. We can save the world. Start over. Do something, something real.” - Bad Luck, Have No Fun, and Please Die.
- 366 reads