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Tag: 2026

  • NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    Developed/Published by: Sumo Digital, Sumo Digital Academy / Secret Mode
    Released: 26/03/2026
    Completed: 06/07/2026
    Completion: Won the Egg Cup with Carlisle!

    The World Cup grinding on finally gave me a reason to give my time to this, Sumo Digital’s “Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager” because I was, at least in the group stages, going to have a lot of games on that I didn’t exactly feel I needed to give my full attention (but I still wanted to see the goals and that.)

    Now, I’m not someone who really bothers with football manager games, but I like deckbuilders and I really loved the theming of this, chock-full of the kind of maximalist skeuomorphism that hasn’t really been seen in games since the likes of Yes, Prime Minister (and which does really feel like a very “British games” kind of thing.) It was definitely enough to make me get over the main issue I have: that I love football, but I just don’t care about club football at all.

    Love a game that gives you a desk: Yes, Prime Minister (Oxford Digital, 1987) vs. Nutmeg!

    I suspect that’s an unbelievably unusual opinion, but if you’re going to feel that way, growing up in Scotland is probably what’s going to do it. Which I suppose makes it somewhat ironic that probably the most major issue I have with Nutmeg! is that it’s limited to the English leagues, which I care about even less. I get it: they’re recreating 20 years of football history right down to the real transfers happening at the right time, and that’s a lot of data entry (I suspect Sumo Digital Academy had to take on quite a bit of grunt work) and it’s probably the most famous and popular league in the world, but I hope that they’ll be able to add the Scottish leagues in future, so players can try and desperately make the top flight of Scottish football in the era even slightly interesting (sorry.)

    But still, don’t say I don’t persevere. I simply picked the most northern teams I could get–first York, which I got to the second division–and then Carlisle, the most northern English football team you can get.1

    In general, however, one of the nice things about Nutmeg! is that I don’t think you have to be a locked-in  football fan to enjoy it. Thanks to setting itself to an era and going for a more abstracted take on the sport, Nutmeg! does manage to split the difference between being a “themed video game” and a “football manager” and that makes it worth playing even if you just think it looks interesting but you only know the barest about football.

    Despite that, I do think the tutorial doesn’t explain the game as well as it should, which is why I’ve written an entire guide for it. However, in short, the thing that needs to be understood about Nutmeg! is that it’s not a deckbuilder about building a “perfect engine” that you use across the game, but instead a game about percentages. Nutmeg! is more like a streamlined, card-based XCOM than it is a football-themed Slay The Spire. 

    The majority of your time is spent actually being a football manager: you’re trying to build the best team of players you can, and to do that you’ll need to make money–selling merch and improving your stadium to sell more tickets–and hire the best staff to train and support them. The loop, really, boils down to acquiring the best players you can to win matches which allows you to make more money to buy even better players. Unless you chose to play in marathon mode, you aren’t going to play every game–meaning that you mostly go into games with a straight percentage chance of winning or drawing, and only a little leeway to affect that by choosing your team’s tactics and formation.

    So quickly you learn: you can’t win every game, unless you want to engage in brutal, repetitive save scumming.2 You have to pick your battles–and the trick here is that’s where the deckbuilding game kicks in, with card-based matches.

    I really love the matches. The system isn’t entirely elegant, but it does a great job of representing the highs and lows of a football match. Football matches are 90+ minutes and they tell stories that boil down easily into highlights, and this is how Nutmeg! works. Again, you can’t expect to simply build a perfect deck and win. First of all, any cards you use in a match get burned off, so your deck is constantly changing. Secondly, every action is that XCOM-like battle of percentages that you try to bend in your favour with your hand of cards. Want to score a goal? Well, if the goalie is incredible and your striker… not, you’ll have to spend the best attacking card you have and still not guarantee the goal.

    Everything in Nutmeg! is a gamble, and that simply feels right for what they’re trying to do. Strong teams are better than weak teams, but absolutely unlikely things can happen… about as often as unlikely things happen. You won’t get a division 5 team beating a first division team, but underdogs can still win the day with the right cards, and there’s a real thrill in having saved a powerful card until you absolutely need it, like in a cup knockout game, knowing that if you lose it, you’re probably out till next year. 

    But there’s always next year.

    Nutmeg! is a really nice “casual” take on football and management sims. How good players are is very clear–you really don’t have to pour over the stats–and the matches you play matter. But it’s not perfect. There are no issues that ruin it, exactly, but there’s definitely a culmination of niggles that could turn you off.

    First, that UI. It’s charming, and I love that it evolves across the years, but it’s also really busy, overcomplicated, and slow to navigate. It feel like they’ve created a lot of redundancy to try and make it simpler to do more things, but it’s confusing, and made worse by the fact that the way they highlight what you’re selecting is far too subtle. And then when you actually switch screens there are animations, zooms… I’m aware that if they cut this down the game would feel very static, but especially as the game settles into a loop where you’re doing the same things flicking between screens over and over, you’re going to get very tired of it (and a bit dizzy, frankly.)

    Then there are the weak points of the game’s loop. Ensuring players keep their skills trained up is just tedious busywork; I get the idea (you can’t keep all your players at their full potential) but couldn’t the game just… switch players at max out for me? They already ensure players change which skill they’re training when they max them out, so it’s not totally out of pocket to ask.

    There are some subtler issues, too. Early in the game as you’re building up your team, the cards you’ll be getting usually work with the recipes you have. But with a well trained team, you might be getting only the top-tier “basic” cards, meaning that the recipes you want, which often use lower-ranked basics, you can’t make! I want the 50% goal card, not the 60% goal card that might fail, but if I never see a 20% attack card I can’t make it. It’s a strange–and probably not easily solved–design issue. Maybe give players the ability to split cards?

    And ultimately, there’s a limit to how long you’re going to want to play Nutmeg! as there’s only the four divisions and the Egg Cup. The game offers twenty years of seasons and having played it for not quite half that, there’s a feeling of diminishing returns as the game starts to feel like it boils down to just waiting to make enough money to snipe the best players from other teams even if they cost millions and millions of pounds. There aren’t quite enough events or stories to be told once you’re topping the league unless you just want to start over with a different club. You know, adding the Scottish leagues would give players new things to aim for…

    All that said, I had a blast in my time with this, as it somehow scratches the football itch, the deckbuilder itch, and even the XCOM itch. It’s not perfect, but it does exactly what it sets out to do and you really can’t say fairer than that.

    Will I ever play it again? Although I led my team to a win in the Egg Cup, they haven’t lifted the first division trophy. I could be convinced to attempt such a feat if there are any future updates to the game. Like if they added Scottish leagues. Just worth mentioning. Again.

    Final Thought: Of course, Nutmeg! Isn’t the only football manager to explore the XCOM concept, there’s also Football, Tactics & Glory, which also recently put out a World Cup update. I’m eager to compare and contrast at some point in the future, but I am a bit footballed out now–I played this for like 30 hours!

    1. I could, if I was absolutely dedicated, have attempted to stuff my teams with Scottish players, but they don’t include nationality in the stats and the ones I recognised instantly were all knocking on a bit, even if it would have been pretty funny to field Frank “Wherza Burds?” McAvennie (sorry, I know this post is getting extremely regional.) ↩︎
    2. You can choose to play the game seeded so you can make it impossible to save scum. I recommend this–but you’ll regret it every time you lose a match or fail to attract a new player, so be warned. ↩︎
  • How To Play NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    How To Play NUTMEG! (Sumo Digital, 2026)

    I’ve been playing Nutmeg! Sumo Digital’s “Nostalgic Deckbuilding Football Manager” during the World Cup and enjoying it a great deal, but I found it difficult to get into originally due to a tutorial I didn’t quite get and the game’s extreme (if charming) skeuomorphic UI. The game actually has quite a simple rhythm to it and the actual deckbuilder—once you understand what it’s doing—is fun rather than frustratingly random, so I thought rather than just post up a review of it I could immediately recommend it and explain how to play it rather than have you waste half a season not sure what you’re doing. Of course, working that out might be part of the fun for you—I might be making it too easy for you here—but this is a solid foundation to play the game from, I think.

    The Management Bit

    So, the thing about Nutmeg! is that even though it’s a deckbuilder, it’s not really what you’re going to spend most of your time doing. You will, ultimately, be doing a lot of managing a football team, trying to manage costs, buy and train players, and give yourself the best chance of winning as many games as possible as you only play one card game out of five matches.

    (If you like you can play every match by choosing “marathon mode” but one of the most important things you need to understand is that you just aren’t going to win every match, and especially in the early game while you’re slopping about in the fourth division that’s going to be quite deflating. You want to choose the games where you think playing will give you the edge.)

    The game is played on a month-to-month basis. Each month you’ll play five games–possibly a sixth if the Egg Cup is on–and you can see your “edge” in each match, so you can work out which games you can delegate because you’ll probably win, or delegate because it’s a “scheduled loss” or play to win.

    At the start of each and every month, you’ve got a lot of housekeeping to do. First, check your “To-Do” list (the highlighter on the board.)

    • This has a few things you need to do in order to get a free booster pack of cards. You want this booster pack, especially if you’re trying to drag a crap team up. The things it asks are pretty simple, and if you follow this guide you’ll know how to do them. Some, like winning games, are sadly a bit of luck unless you want to save-scum, but the main one you have to watch out for are the media interview requirements: you’re more likely to get them when you win games by a lot of goals, so you might want to broadcast some games you’re favoured in.

    Now you want to go straight to the magazine on the table.

    • You want to check if you have the best staff possible. The game has three kinds of staff: coaches, support and office.
      • All staff can provide “recipes” which are necessary for the deckbuilding portion of the game. In my opinion this is a major priority: you want as many of the right recipes as possible. You may wish to keep a slightly weaker staff member for the recipe(s) they offer.
      • Coaches train players and ensure you have the right kind of cards for the deckbuilding game: defence, control, attack, goalkeeping, and stamina.
      • Support includes assistant coaches, which you want a lot of as soon as you have any players who have skills, as they are the only way to train those skills. There are scouts, who find players and give you their information. Other support include psychologists and nutritionists and things like that, who help with morale, provide half-time boosts and may need to be unlocked by building facilities.
      • Office staff are things like accountants and recruiters who help with your budget or help find better coaches and other staff. A good recruiter seems very worth the money.
      • There’s no downside to firing staff and hiring new staff on a month-to-month basis, so just always have the best staff you can!
    • You want to check the transfer market. Use your scout to scope out any player that catches your eye that you can afford (you can’t go into debt buying players) and hope they have some skills. You want players with skills!
      • When buying a player you need to make an offer, with a percentage chance of it succeeding. You only get one chance, so work out how much you want them. You may wish to make promise like playing in the first eleven or training to snag them–and when you’re poor, that will be necessary. But it becomes a ball ache later when the player simply isn’t good enough any more because you’ve gone up a division–you’re at the mercy of the market if you have to shift a player and they can hang around and cause morale issues. 
      • Don’t forget to list players for sale that you don’t need, too. Obviously, just pick the ones with the lowest numbers, but be aware that some seemingly crap players have high potential, so you might want to hold on to certain younger players and hope they train up fast.
    • If you need to, check the front page of the magazine to see if you’ve still got a sponsor or not. If you don’t, hop on the phone, call the commercial director, and take a sponsor.
      • Sponsors largely have a negative effect on player, fan and board morale. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but it doesn’t particularly matter because you’re wanting to build that up by playing well, and you need money. Football is a money game even at the lowest tier.
    • Speaking of: go to the computer and check your merchandise. You want to try and match your merch to the season/how well things are going. To be honest, this doesn’t seem like it matters a ton, but if it’s winter, you want to be selling wooly hats. Summer, caps. As soon as you can, buy the merch facility because it allows you to sell four pieces of merch, meaning you can largely set this and forget it.

    Phew! Now you have to do something every week:

    • Check your skills training. At first, this is going to be fine, because you’re going to have like one or two skill training slots and maybe a couple of players with skills. But you’ll end up with six slots and entire team of skilled players. Skills degrade, so you will have to juggle players around these slots constantly. Is this boring and annoying? Yes. But it’s also something you’ll want to do, because skills give you “crits” and the percentages can be high (like 50%) giving you situations where players automatically succeed passes and even at scoring goals.

    Meanwhile, play or delegate the game each week.

    • When delegating, use your judgement on what positioning to use but be prepared for the percentages to go against you no matter what you choose. Injuries are really common in Nutmeg! so you’ll probably constantly have to shuffle players around–don’t think you can sell all your subs to save money. You’ll want a minimum of a couple of players spare for every position–this can be an issue definitely with forwards, because the game doesn’t have any formations like 5-4-1 so if you’re down to one forward you’re stuck playing a midfielder out of position.

    Before the last game of the month, go back to the computer and check attendance. If you’re filling your stadium, go to the blueprints and buy an upgrade (if you can afford it) or plan to do so as soon as you can. It’ll get built immediately at the start of the following month.

    You can buy facilities at any point as soon as you can afford them, because they get built instantly. You want the ones that make money or allow you to hire new staff. Past a certain point, it makes sense to leave a facility space open for sponsor facilities, which are free and make you the big bucks.

    Playing Games

    Before you choose to broadcast any match, go to training and make sure you’re chosen a coach to “focus”. One of Nutmeg!’s biggest issues it that you can’t see the hand of cards you hold already1 so you’ll have to remember if you are–for example–completely lacking any goalkeeping cards and so you want to focus on the coach that provides them. Once you’ve done that, choose to broadcast the match.

    • Before you actually play the game, you will open a “booster pack” of cards that you can add to your hand. But what you really want to do is to have a bunch of recipes–thanks to your staff, or players who also can provide them–allowing you to combine cards into much more powerful ones. You don’t want a basic Sidewinder card (+30% to saving a goal.) You want to merge that with another Sidewinder to get the “Penalty King” card, giving you +60%.
    • You always want to come into matches with some goalkeeping cards. You can never draw them from the tactics deck.
    • Frankly, I don’t know if formation really makes any difference in this game–in every delegated match 4-4-2 seemed to be the best option, so I never changed it. The classics are classic for a reason, I guess.
    • However, your positioning–to either drop back, push up or hold shape–absolutely matters, and you can change this between every game event if you wish. This is important because during a game you will be aware of what cards you have in your hand: if you have no attacking cards, but lots of defensive cards, you can “push up” to try and draw more attacking cards from the tactical deck, which are “free” cards you draw if your hand isn’t full. If you just want to try and park the bus after a few goals, “drop back.”
    • IMPORTANT: before playing games, you can look at your opponents players, and if any of them take your fancy, “headhunt” them using a scout action and have them show up for transfer the next month. This is an important way of growing your squad with better players–don’t forget to do it!

    The way games are played is a match is boiled down to a series of runs. I’ll be honest–I don’t know quite what the system is that decides when in the game and how an event is chosen during runs–but if you watch the pitch map that gets drawn on the side of the screen, it might be fairly complex (or all smoke and mirrors.) In each run, you’re either defending or attacking, and a series of events are played until the run ends via an event that ends it (a goal, or a tackle, for example.)

    •  Every time you can play a card, you are trying to affect the percentages of the cards on screen in your favour. Generally, there are three cards available per event during a run: one that benefits your opponent, one that’s neutral(-ish) and one that benefits you. You want to increase the percentage of “goal” over “miss” or “save” (to give the most obvious example) by playing the best attack card (so a Goal Rush card, that gives you +30%, is what you want to play.)
    • You can only play the kind of cards that match the event. So if you’re all out of defensive cards, you are at the mercy of the quality of your defenders. This can go wrong fast.
    • The most important thing to understand is that Nutmeg! is sort of… card-based football X-COM. You are going to get screwed by the percentages, and it’s going to feel even more unfair if you’ve just spent a bunch of cards to get to goal and your opponent crits and automatically saves your shot. The entire game is about putting yourself in the position to win–not guaranteeing your win. It is amazingly accurate to football in that way.
    • If you score a goal, you get momentum, which means you get cards back in your hand–so there is a benefit to spending your expensive cards chasing the win. 

    The most important thing about a match, however, is that you keep the cards you don’t play for future games (apart from any free cards from the tactical deck you draw during the game.) This means that you have incentive to burn tactical deck cards and also to play conservatively when you can. Momentum is important here. If you’ve scored a goal and are winning, you might not want to burn new cards to score another–but you’ll lose the cards you’ve played even if they go back to your hand (where amusingly they look tarnished) so you can play them again. Similarly, if you’ve scored a bunch of goals, you might want to hold off on spending expensive defensive cards unless you’re facing an equaliser.

    After a game, sometimes you’ll get called by the press to comment. This can’t go wrong, so just praise whichever stakeholder needs the boost unless your to-do list requires you praise someone specific.

    Anyway, that’s basically Nutmeg! Have fun!

    1. If you can see this somewhere I couldn’t find it, which I think is on the game, not me. ↩︎

  • Alpha (2026)

    Alpha (2026)

    The YRF Spy Universe has produced a couple of my favourite films ever in War and (in particular) the criminally unsuccessful War 2 (my favourite film of last year!) but it is, let’s say… patchy. I mean… several of the films star a very bad man–just look at his absurdly long controversies entry on Wikipedia–but I’ve been willing to give the franchise the benefit of the doubt because I’m such a sucker for Hrithik Roshan’s beautiful eyes. 

    Christ you could drown in them.

    For a shared universe that only decided it was one three film in, Alpha–unfortunately–has taken the wrong lessons from the already burst Marvel/DC bubble and decided what the franchise needs is films that are exposition-stuffed origin stories that feel more like set-up for future cameos than they are, you know, enjoyable movies in their own right.

    This is a real “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” of a film, and it’s one that constantly teases a fireworks factory before just… not showing you it. I’m not sure if it was the first time feature director Shiv Rawail1 just not being up to the job–the film was postponed for reshoots, apparently–but if you compare the film to War 2: that movie opens with an action sequence that would be the climax in any other movie, and Alpha opens by introducing a bad-ass group of super-soldiers who… take part in a training exercise where they don’t do anything cool, that we mostly watch from a board room.

    Because really we’re only here to learn all about the R&AW chief’s struggle to have a child. 

    My favourite example of this–if you’ll allow me to skip ahead a bit–is that before the intermission, we see our heroes, seemingly trapped in an impossible situation, all primed to kick ass. “Finally,” you think, “we’re going to get a truly balls to the wall action sequence.”

    When the film returns from intermission the two action stars are told by their dad to run away, which they proceed to do. They tee us up, make us anticipate, and then nothing cool happens.

    (Our heroes literally spend most of the movie on a fun bonding road trip to a safehouse.)

    There’s a real sense that they just didn’t have any idea what to do with this film. My suspicion is that this exists because someone noticed that maybe the War sub-series is just a teensy bit homoerotic and said “we gotta get some hot ladies up in this.” 

    It was decided, of course, that ladies are weak and meek, so they need to have a reason why they could be the equal of any man (super serum) but even then the film just doesn’t really do anything with our stars. I like Alia Bhatt, but it seems like they kind of shrugged and went, “I dunno… kind of make her look like Letty from Fast & Furious” and that was about as many ideas as they had. If you need an idea of how badly served Bhatt and her co-star Sharvari are, the film’s big cameo is (spoiler?) Hrithik Roshan, and he is already cooler than them sitting still and doing nothing. When he actually gets up to fight, he does three cool things immediately that are more awesome than anything Bhatt, the ostensible star of this film does at any point. And he’s just supposed to be a normal guy!!!

    If there’s an elephant in this room, though, it’s that the YRF Spy Universe already does have a kick-ass female protagonist, Katrina Khaif’s Zoya from the Tiger movies, but she’s from Pakistan, and Alpha absolutely represents Indian cinema’s increasingly histrionic nationalism. Long gone are any calls for mutual understanding, and there’s a sense that even “there are some good ones” is beyond the pale. This isn’t the worst example of it I’ve seen in a while (Fighter, *shudder*) but it absolutely casts a pallor over the climax.

    Not that the climax is that great anyway. I mean… it’s fine, I suppose. By the time you get to it, the movie has led you to not expect much, and when it doesn’t give you very much, it doesn’t really feel that worth complaining about.

    A flop and a let down, then, and I’d think it’d likely be a nail in the coffin for this stumbling franchise but I suspect they’ll push through on a future Paathan movie. Indian men in their [checks notes] 60s are allowed to do cool stuff on screen so that one will probably work. Lord knows I’ll show up for it.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

    1. A long time assistant director, has done a TV show, and a nepo baby, but the last one is basically a prerequisite for being in Indian cinema, so it’s not like we can hold that against him any more than usual. ↩︎
  • The Mandalorian And Grogu (2025)

    The Mandalorian And Grogu (2025)

    The Mandalorian And Grogu is a movie that seems to be at cross-purposes with itself. If you look at the marketing’s styling and the source material (by which I mean the show, rather than Star Wars writ large) it seems obvious that The Mandalorian And Grogu is not supposed to be a huge, tentpole piece of summer cinema; it’s really meant to be a charming throwback to the era of film serials (indeed the very film serials that Star Wars was inspired by the first place). 

    Sure, maybe it’s a bit more like the later period of features like the Zatoichi series or (if you’re feeling especially uncharitable) luchador films, but the idea is: you’re going to show up to see a movie starring “those characters you like” have a sort of inconsequential and probably formulaic adventure, but because you saw “those characters that you like” doing the stuff you like seeing them do, you’ve had a good time.

    It’s not a horrible idea, except for the fact that they made a huge deal about seeing The Mandalorian And Grogu in IMAX, the film cost $165 million dollars, and serials succeeded because the cinema was the only place you could see those characters that you like and we’re all already accustomed to seeing the Mandalorian and Grogu have low-stakes adventures at home. There better be something pretty special if I’m going out and paying the ridiculous IMAX surcharge to see it!!!

    There is not.

    I’ll say up front: I wanted to like this. A major issue with The Mandalorian as a show is the seeming terror Disney has had in, you know, committing to anything featuring major character development post The Last Jedi. Were you moved when Mando delivered Baby Yoda to Luke Skywalker1? Well, Disney definitely felt that you couldn’t bear to see them apart so desperately that they had to reunite them immediately… in a spin-off! I’m not entirely sure why, but I think I imagined that if they were making a film, it was because they really had something they wanted to make. They had some clear, concrete idea at hand.

    They did not.

    I’m not sure I’ve seen a film as devoid of a thesis as this one in a long time. If you’re really reaching, it’s something about fatherhood? Rotta “Stinky” The Hutt bangs on about his bad father enough. Maybe it’s about children growing and coming into their own? Maybe? There’s no reason for me to be reaching this hard, no one making The Mandalorian And Grogu did. It’s incredibly clear no one was originally thinking “oh let’s make a charming throwback to film serials.” They were thinking “we need to get something, anything in theatres to keep the franchise warm.” A transparent act of desperation, and it’s all over the movie. Stinky’s second speech about his dad repeats so fully what he said in his first that it’s one of the clearest signifiers that this was obviously originally a season of TV, reading as it does “well, you probably forgot what he said last week.”

    It’s not that there aren’t fun concepts here. I, on paper, like that the first proper chunk of the film is going for a noir, detective story vibe, but it ends with the (masked) Mando being knocked out with poison gas. Uh, ok. Later, I like the idea of Grogu having to come into his own. But that ends with him being given a magic potion by a random character. Very meaningful!

    Every beat that could lead somewhere meaningful is frittered away to nothing, and instead we get the exact thing that killed things like Solo: a relentless urge to show us Star Wars shit we recognize. Or are supposed to recognize. A guy from Star Wars Rebels is there and I guess we’re supposed to be losing our minds, but I don’t really know who that is. An arena battle happens… and it’s just like the holochess from the Millennium Falcon. I know what that is, but I don’t care, and I don’t need to see it!!!2

    This shit sucks, man. Here’s something that actually is cool that they did: getting Phill Tippett, who worked on the original holochess sequence, to create Chekhov’s cool new robots for a later stop-motion sequence. Now that I like!

    Except for the fact that Jon Favreau can’t shoot action for shit. In every sequence I basically had no idea what was going on. It’s a neat idea to try and do a Hong Kong-action style bar fight, for example, but the only part of the action I could follow was noticing when dudes tried to punch a guy wearing a Mandalorian helmet in the face. That’s going to hurt! It doesn’t make sense even in the moment!

    Every action sequence from the opening sequence also suffers from another major issue, which I call the “this seems very dangerous for a baby to be at” problem. The solution they came up with was “just make the baby disappear for most of the shots” and I gotta say… It doesn’t work.

    If TV didn’t exist, they were banging one of these out every year or six months, and going to the cinema cost a nickel, then sure, this would be fine. But in 2026 this is symbolic of the fact that they just gotta put Star Wars to bed. Make me want to revisit this world. Before The Mandalorian And Grogu was over I was desperate to leave it.

    Follow Mathew on Letterboxd.

    1. Sorry, a horrifying digital cadaver, but close enough. ↩︎
    2. I did like when they showed a picture of Clone Wars-era Stinky. Good joke! ↩︎
  • Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

    In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Sam Rockwell stars as a man who claims to be from a future where AI has wiped out half the population and the other half live unable to escape their personal “perfect” AI realities. He takes a NORMS hostage with the belief that some combination of the restaurant’s diners will be able to reach the creator of the AI so they can install safeguards before it’s too late (the film, intelligently, accepts the inevitability of AI and has a sensibly scaled goal as a result.)

    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die–immediately–takes aim at our modern affliction: that we’re all looking at our phones, all the time. The satire feels a bit broad, with entire classrooms of students all just trapped in an endless scroll, and I’ve seen more than one sneery “ok boomer” take on this. 

    But.

    Last year I worked background for a while on a TV show, which is a job I rather like; there’s a lot of downtime where you can do things like finishing editing that zine you were working on. I haven’t done it in years, and the one huge thing I noticed was that while there was still a small contingent of people who brought books, or wanted to chat with whoever they were sitting next to (whether they wanted to or not…) the largest cohort of people—who were of all ages—just looked at their phone. Now, I look at my phone a lot too, but I was taken by how the majority of them used it: on Instagram or Tiktok, scrolling at high speed, endlessly. Like they weren’t actually seeing anything. Just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. For hours.

    It looked exactly like it does in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

    Serendipitously, I’ve been reading the recent reprint of Natasha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, which details the concept of the “machine zone.”

    From the book’s description:

    “Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the ‘machine zone,’  in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion.”

    Social media, as it currently exists, has been designed in exactly the same way slot machines have. It has been continuously and intentionally evolved, using every trick gambling designers have come up with (and more) to make sure people pick up their phone at the merest hint of boredom or discomfort. And now AI is here to make the skinner box even more personalised than the algorithm has already managed, with the ultimate goal that, eventually, you don’t put the phone down. Ever. 

    A perfect smooth-brained populace, circuses so good they don’t realise there’s no bread.

    You might think I’m being histrionic, but addiction is a disease, and we now live in a climate of a designed disease. We’re all addicted—to varying levels—and we need to start treating it the same way we should be treating any addiction: by being hard on those who peddle the addictive substance, and treating the addicted with care and respect rather than punitive measures. And we need to wake up to this now, before it’s too late.

    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die get it.

    It feels absurd for a Gore Verbinski movie to be the first thing I’ve seen outside of Adam Curtis documentaries to get it, but welcome to the resistance, I guess?

    Don’t get me wrong. This is a big, fun, silly film. It’s trying to make its point by being entertaining, not preachy, and here’s none of the nihilism of a Black Mirror. It embarrasses Edgar Wright’s The Running Man, a movie that seems like it’s trying to say something angry and real about the world we live in and manages to say nothing at all. And not only is it not a sequel, remake, or part of a franchise, it’s also not “new IP.” It’s just a movie, which is almost the most subversive thing about it.

    It’s a little scattershot, could be a little shorter, Asim Chaudry’s accent is… not good. But it refuses to fall into some traps that might blunt it (there’s no “AI can be good if we just use it correctly” here) and frankly, I’d follow Sam Rockwell anywhere.

    There’s not a lot of movies where I think “I hope a lot of people see this” but this is one of them, not least because it’s just a straight up enjoyable film. I admit I wrote this to post online, on a social network, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die chimed so much with my own experience that I now notice, just a little more, when I pick up my phone for what feels like no reason, and to then try and interrogate it.

    Sure, the movie might only be mildly illuminating on the dangers of our encroaching, all encompassing “machine zone”, but sometimes a little extra light on the problem is all you need to actually see it.

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