Crew
Directors/Screenplay – Matthew Arnold & Freddie Wong, Producer – Adam Maffei, Photography – Bongani Mlambo, Music – Maxton Waller, Visual Effects – AB Studios (Supervisor – Chaitanya Chandratre), King’s Ransom Media (Supervisors – Julian Kreusser & Nicolaus Waetjen), Neon Robotic (Supervisor – Nathan Weiner), Playfight (Supervisor – Sophia Lee) & RocketJump, Production Design – Amelia Steely. Production Company – Rocketjump/Rough & Tumble Films/Anchor Stone Productions/King’s Ransom Media.
Cast
Ashly Burch (Thalia), Jordan Rodrigues (Kai), Chase Mangum (Hunter), Luis Antonius Crete (Brody), Nicole Javier (Officer Jenna), Beth May (Autumn), Tom E. Proctor (Penny Man), Willow Hale (Beatrice Stockholm), Viv Vescio (Ralph), Nevada Arnold (Stung Child)
Plot
The Spike, a giant tentacle of unknown origin has appeared on Earth, stretching up into the stratosphere. It periodically teleports to random different parts of the world, causing chaos as it displaces all that is in the near vicinity. Twelve years after the Spike’s appearance, Thalia is an apiarist in Arizona, grieving the loss of her husband and daughter. She now receives an order to deliver several hives of bees to California and sets out across country. On the road, she skids and nearly crashes into a car on the road. Kai, an EMT and DJ, is sleeping in the car of his friend Dave, who killed himself, in an effort to overcome his grief. Kai bandages Thalia’s wounded knee only for the two of them to be displaced by a sudden appearance of The Spike. Thalia’s bees are left behind and so she sets out across country to find them and complete her order. She reluctantly allows Kai to come along with her. As they journey, a connection grows between them.
We’re All Gonna Die was a feature-length directorial debut for Matthew Arnold and Freddie Wong who had previously worked together on the tv series Video Game High School (2012-4), RocketJump: The Show (2015-6), Dimension 404 (2017) and Anime Crimes Division (2017- ).
We’re All Gonna Die is nominally a science-fiction film. There is a giant structure – the synopsis calls it an alien tentacle 10,000 miles long but in the film itself there is no explanation offered or even speculated, it just is. It has the habit of regularly teleporting to a different location and sweeping up what is in the near vicinity as it does so.
This is certainly a film with an SF premise but in a larger sense the SF elements are almost irrelevant to the story. In fact, the title proclamation ‘we’re all gonna die’ is not even one that could be said to be in danger of happening anywhere throughout. In actuality, We’re All Gonna Die is the old familiar standard of the Road Movie. We have the genre’s familiar tropes of two eccentric characters – a beekeeper and an EMT tech both with unresolved grief issues – who are thrust together in the course of having to make a cross-country journey. As is fairly much expected with the plots of these films, they meet an assortment of oddball characters along the way, while the initial differences thaw and grow into an eventual attraction by the end.
I didn’t particularly warm to Ashly Burch and Jordan Rodrigues as characters at the outset. It felt like We’re All Gonna Die was an indie film trying too hard to be quirky. However, as the show went on, the two of them started to grow on you. The supporting characters encountered – two teenage guys who are trying to cycle cross country, a collector with a metal detector, a survivalist mother – are never quite as eccentric or as colourful as you feel they should have been. Eventually though it is the two oddball characters and their past issues that come to the fore that carry the film and allows it to arrive with modest affect.
Trailer here