Although “We’re All Gonna Die” begins well, as it offers a catchy pitch in its trailer, the core of the movie is uninterested in it. Wong and Arnold of RocketJump put in the hard work and somehow achieve great moments in lead performances even though they don’t keep it real which leads to ridiculous tonal shifts in the movie.
The movie successfully set the stage for the impending doom through news commentary and social media snippets. The events following twelve years into the future seem more like a daydream Death and Casualty have reached such numbers that it’s just an account of routine.
While the bee farmer Thalia (Ashly Burch) carries on with her daily duties, her family, including her parents and parents in law, have come together to grieve her lost husband and daughter something she also seems to us, as she hardly appears to care for the tombstone maintenance, amid the overgrown weeds. As the enormous stalactite remains in clear view, Thalia embarks on an urgent honey transport with her truck, in an attempt to clear her ever increasing debts, a journey in which one could say she bumps into Kai (Jordan Rodrigues), an emergency medical technican who is still in grieving period after having lost his best friend and passes time in his abandoned sports car. In no time, a combination of collision and meet cute scene, is disrupted by a freak occurrence of some spike-related phenomena which translocates Thalia’s bees to some unknown place, as well as the recent car Kai inherited from his late friend, across the borders. Hence, the two of them are forced to join up for a physically demanding retrieval and tragedy of their losses, Lai’s to give a car not just to a stranger but his mothers boyfriend, and Thalia’s suffering the career loss, become more and more in focus.
Regrettably, other problems are quickly noticeable regarding the construction of this film. The film has enough snatches of silent interaction between the characters that they make a minor, humorous observation such as Thalia saying that she hates the fact that she finds Kai’s strong calves appealing, but their dialogue appears to be very shallow and needs variation, which makes the scenes too long, dull and monotonic. This jagged quality applies to the humor of the film also; besides the sight gags (Thalia’s inability to control her lust for thighs), the jokes in the film do not come from the unique characteristics of the people and their relationships but rather from the comments and witticisms that can be made by any of the characters.
The low blows exchanged by the couple at the beginning are meant to develop some interest, romantic or otherwise, between them against the background of their bewildering situation but this sort of talk is rarely sophisticated across the board, even when all the characters are compelled to consider the varying responses to mortality. It gets to a point where every known artist hopeless and often pretty much pathetically depressed kings or queens in their own right they encounter becomes the butt of their sarcasm which produces a kind of vindictive humor that is rare even in contemporary films.
The concept of life as a more-than-just a bleak deterministic metaphor is where the movie’s concept makes a return in its final form. In spite of being foreboded, this epic feeling of slow motion suddenly reappears with detached physics and, more importantly, a metaphor that hasn’t been defined before. What I mean by this is that it becomes ironic as what is supposed to be a focusing device in this case becomes a roaming metaphor that is too flexible and removed to clamor with the people speaking in the ancient time frame.
Abstract sci-fi is still an immense source for elaborating on topics related to grief, Schrodinger’s cat, Anderson’s “Dune”, or even Aronofsky in “The Fountain”. However, even if it is an interesting topic to explore, “We’re All Gonna Die” does not even try to do it as its symbols look too scattered and unclear. This conceivably is the right psychological response for a movie of this nature which tried to recuperate after a plague while battling the introduction of alien entities into the social structure. And while the theme of loss is recurrent in all the characters, the movie doesn’t fully embrace the scope of these changes in the fabric of society, nor how individuals would be affected by such profound changes.
At the very least, Burch and Rodrigues manage to perform some emotional heavy lifting that make the movie feel human in the light of Bongani Mlambo’s dreamy but warm cinematography which is nothing short of magic hour. The performers grapple, albeit in effective and deliberate fashion, with the disorienting scale of bereavement. Yet the directors, too, not so purposefully, attempt to situate such events within a specific framework. Thus, “Everything is going to be ok,” becomes woefully poignant, what it is not supposed to be.
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