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You’ve seen this movie before: A disheveled man (Sam Rockwell) busts into a restaurant, threatening to blow up the joint unless a crew of people joins him. Like Groundhog Day, he’s been through this countless times before, and he immediately starts recounting otherwise unknowable details to convince the diner patrons. Like 12 Monkeys, he’s from the future — the timely twist in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is that, rather than a world-ending virus, he needs help preventing a humanity-ending AI from being born. 

Good Luck is more of a primal scream than a thoughtful articulation about where everything went wrong. There’s a bit of “old man yells at cloud” energy here (director Gore Verbinski is 61, and screenwriter Matthew Robinson is 47), but it fits the film’s satirical tone. Looking around at the world today, who doesn’t wish they could warn their past selves about the tech industry and the new ruling class it helped breed. 

Rockwell’s character eventually wrangles a ragtag crew of future saviors: Mark and Janet (Michael Pena and Zazie Beetz), a married couple of high school teachers; Susan (Juno Temple), a distraught mother; and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a sad woman wearing a princess dress. There’s also Asim Chaudhry’s Scott, who mostly serves as comic relief, but doesn’t get any real backstory like the others. 

Good Luck wastes no time fleshing out its present near-dystopia in episodic chapters. It turns out Mark and Janet are also on the run from smartphone-obsessed high schoolers, who spend their days scrolling through endless TikTok-like feeds. Susan is forced to confront a horrific situation around her son (I won’t get into specifics here, but it’s a distinctly American phenomenon). And Ingrid is literally allergic to Wi-Fi and smart devices, which makes it hard to fit into the modern world. 

Each of these scenarios play out like mini Black Mirror episodes. Everything is heightened to the absurd, and all the problems can be traced back to unchecked technological encroachment and capitalism. Nothing subtle there. The glimpses of an apocalyptic future are even less so — all we see are destroyed cities, people trapped in VR headsets (which place them in an AI-generated reality) and robots hunting down anti-AI humans. 

Sam Rockwell in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

Good Luck is at its best when it’s simply having fun. As Rockwell and crew make their way to their final destination — a child who is about to invent true AI — they encounter pig-faced assassins, Stepford-esque parents and an adorably horrific kaiju. Even when faced with half-baked scripts, Verbinski always manages to impress visually (think back to the creepiness of The Ring, or the wildly entertaining set pieces in Pirates of the Caribbean). That’s as true as ever here, where the final scene evokes the hyper-tech chaos of Akira.

As much as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, evokes classic sci-fi, it still can’t hold a candle to the sheer terror of seeing AI unleash a nuclear bomb in Terminator 2. And despite its zanines, it doesn’t reach the madcap heights of Gilliam’s Brazil or 12 Monkeys. But if you’re sick of having AI products shoved down your throat, and you think the notion of “true AI” is a farce, it’s a fun way to channel your rage.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/good-luck-have-fun-dont-die-rails-against-ai-in-style-154437854.html?src=rss 

Every once in a while, a product comes along that sparks a bit of joy in our jaded hearts. This is what happened with the Kodak Charmera, a $30 tiny toy camera that was nearly impossible to get ahold of in the first couple of months after its release, selling out immediately over waves of blind box restocks. Despite the gimmick of it all, the Charmera was just too cute for some of us to resist, and we sprang when they finally started becoming more readily available. 

A few of us on the Engadget team have one now, and even with all of its shortcomings, we kind of love this thing. Here’s what two of our writers think about it. 

Lately, it feels like a chore to carry around a full-frame mirrorless camera. My Nikon definitely feels like the right tool to precisely capture a moment in time with fast autofocus and plenty of image resolution. Other times, that perfect moment is more casual, like catching up with friends over dim sum or killing time while you’re snowed in at a cabin in Vermont. In these cases, there’s no reason to carry around a hulking camera and lens to snap a flawless photo that I have to edit later. Instead, something light, discreet and playful feels like the right tool for the occasion.

That’s where the Kodak Charmera comes in. It’s a toy camera with a 35mm lens with a fixed f/2.4 aperture and a 1/4-inch sensor. In other words, the photos this thing takes are about equivalent to what you would get with a crappy flip phone from the 2000s that also plays Snake.

Kodak is clearly trying to wring out the longing for nostalgia within all of us, and has nailed it with the Charmera, which is even inspired by its old-school disposable Fling cameras. It’s definitely not as good as the smartphone in your pocket, but there’s something disarming about snapping a quick shot with a tiny block of plastic that’s lighter than your keys.

Playing around with the Charmera for a few weeks gave me a healthy reminder that the sillier and more transient parts of life don’t need the technical prowess of an expensive camera. Obviously, the Chamera produces photos of terrible quality at 1.6 megapixels and can’t really capture anything fast-moving or in low light, but it’s undeniably fun and hard to resist shooting with. And sometimes, you and your friends are just doing wildly unserious things and you want a camera that matches that energy.

— Jackson Chen, Contributing Reporter

Every time I pull out the Kodak Charmera in public to snap a few pictures, I’m immediately met with a barrage of questions and squeals of delight from full-grown adults: “What is that?”; “Is that a camera?”; “Does it really take pictures?”; “Can I see it?” It is the kind of accessory that doubles as a conversation starter, an effect that’s turned out to be as joyous as taking pictures with the camera itself. I’ve been trying really hard to spend less time on social media and my phone in general lately, and having a two-inch camera clipped to me has made for a pretty fun shift in how I document the day-to-day. 

As the resurgence of compact digital cameras has shown us, a lot of people are yearning for a time of simpler tech — when we had personal devices that could do useful things, like take decent photos and connect us to our friends, but didn’t consume our lives entirely. Companies like Camp Snap have shaped their entire brands around recapturing that magic, and some consumers have shown that they’re willing to sacrifice in areas like image quality in exchange for a taste of it, too. The Kodak Charmera isn’t the kind of product you go into purchasing with high expectations. It is clearly a toy that is only going to be capable of so much. 

As Jackson noted, the low-resolution 1,440  x 1,080 pictures look about on par with those you’d have taken on a flip phone 15 or 20 years ago. In the right lighting conditions with a clearly defined subject, they’re not so bad. But selfies, portraits and nature photos will generally look washed out. It can record videos too — and you should set similarly low expectations for these. 

Despite all that, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’m enjoying the Charmera experience. Its crunchy photos are just good enough to feel like they’re successfully preserving a moment in time. And being so tiny, it’s really convenient to bring everywhere. It even came with me to CES. The Charmera takes a microSD card (sold separately), allowing for tons of storage and easy transferring. There are a bunch of built-in filters you can apply, too, which have been fun to play around with.

If I want high-quality photos, this isn’t the camera I’m going to reach for. But it’s great for low-stakes situations when all I care about is taking some pictures I can look back on fondly later. Consider me charmed. — Cheyenne MacDonald, Weekend Editor

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cameras/the-ridiculously-tiny-kodak-charmera-captured-our-hearts-and-lots-of-shoddy-pictures-140000245.html?src=rss