Gore Verbinski’s return is fast, loud and frequently funny, with Sam Rockwell giving everything as a time traveller trying to save a world that will not look up from its screen. It has about ninety minutes of ideas and 134 minutes of film.
Gore Verbinski has come back with a science fiction comedy about the end of the world, and he has decided the end of the world should be argued about in a diner. A man who says he is from the future (Sam Rockwell) bursts in, tells the customers that the machines are about to win, and starts recruiting. He has been here before. He has tried this many times. Matthew Robinson’s script treats the time loop as a running gag as much as a plot: the hero knows every wrong turn and is too tired to be patient about it. The film is good fun for an hour, patchy for the next half hour, and lost by the end.
Rockwell is the reason to go. He plays the Man from the Future as somebody who has watched the same apocalypse enough times to be bored by it and terrified of it in equal measure, and he does exhaustion better than almost anyone working. He shouts a great deal, because the script asks him to, but the best moments are the ones where he stops, looks at a stranger he has failed before, and decides whether to bother. He is playing a very old joke, the prophet nobody listens to, and he keeps it alive by sheer effort.
The structure is the trouble. Every recruit gets a flashback showing how technology ruined them, so the film keeps stopping to tell short, separate stories about screens. Some are sharp. Juno Temple’s Susan gets a strand about cloning that is unsettling and funny at once, and Temple plays it with a fixed smile that we found harder to watch than any of the action. Haley Lu Richardson’s Ingrid is the one person in the diner who behaves like someone with a life, and the film is steadier whenever it stays with her. Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz get less to do and do it well.
Other vignettes feel like complaints about the internet written some years ago and left in a drawer. Jokes about people staring at their phones, about likes, about nobody talking to each other, arrive with the confidence of a fresh observation. They are not fresh. Each time the film returns to the diner it has to build its momentum again, and Craig Wood’s cutting, brisk as it is, cannot hide how often the story has been put down and picked up.
We laughed, properly and often, in the first hour, mostly at Rockwell’s face as another plan went wrong. Somewhere past the ninety-minute mark, when the film went into yet another backstory, we felt it go slack, and it did not recover. The last act moves into a bigger, stranger place we will not describe. What we can say is that it is where the digital effects do the heaviest lifting, and they are not up to it, and that the film seems to mistake volume for a resolution.
Jim Whitaker shoots the diner in grubby, close, ordinary light and saves the wide, clean frames for the set pieces, which is a sensible choice and makes the set pieces feel earned. David Brisbin’s near future is our present with more screens in it, which is the film’s argument in a single design decision and a good one. Neil McClean dresses Rockwell in clothes that look slept in for a decade. Geoff Zanelli’s score is loud and insistent, and in the finale it is doing the work the pictures should be doing.
Verbinski has always liked chaos more than tidiness, and in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) and Rango (2011) the chaos had a spine. Here the spine is an idea about how tired we all are of our devices, and it is a fair idea, but the film says it in the first twenty minutes and then keeps saying it.
See it for Rockwell, for Temple’s strand and for the first hour, which is as lively as anything he has made. Sit near the back so the finale is smaller. It runs 134 minutes and carries a 15.
