SXSW 2024: We’re All Gonna Die wastes its filmmaker’s time. Don’t let it waste yours.

We’re All Gonna Die. // Courtesy SXSW

Generally when making a movie — especially one on a shoestring budget — the rule is “less is more.” You want to maximize the power of your storytelling without getting bogged down in extra stuff that strays from the point. Rules are made to be broken, of course, but writing and directing duo Matthew Arnold and Freddie Wong break them in all the wrong ways in their messy sci-fi romcom We’re All Gonna Die.

The film opens on an ambitious note, focusing on the sudden arrival of a massive, teleporting alien monolith called “The Spike,” which towers almost 10,000 miles into the sky. The Spike repeatedly disappears and reappears at various spots on the globe, killing millions each time it does.

12 years and thousands of jumps later, more than 100 million people are dead, and numerous attempts to destroy The Spike have failed. Mass death has become commonplace. Certainly, EMT Kai (Jordan Rodrigues) and Beekeeper Thalia (Ashley Burch), both of whom are grieving recent Spike-related losses, just see it as another of life’s many inconveniences. 

Another inconvenience: These two strangers almost crash into one another outside a state park. Before they can get too far into their meet cute, a Spike-induced phenomenon causes Kai and Thalia to end up in a separate location, halfway across the country from Kai’s recently-inherited Nissan 300 and Thalia’s bees. The pair set off on a road trip to recover Thalia’s hives, with many discoveries around the bend.

Apart from a few nuggets of information to show how the world has changed post-Spike, we don’t get much else out of We’re All Gonna Die. We see some emergent city-states like New Zion, which has its own border check, and a number of ghost towns left abandoned following Spike jumps. Radio stations have largely gone off the air, and metals from the monolith have poisoned fish, leading the CDC to put restrictions on Sushi. Most of these are small details mentioned in passing that don’t serve the plot beyond reminding you this is a Sci-Fi movie we’re watching. Mostly all they do is muck up the pacing.

At just under two hours, it’s safe to say that pacing is significantly mucked up — We’re All Gonna Die feels overlong, overwritten and empty. As leads, Rodrigues and Burch have solid natural chemistry as Thalia and Kai. Other than that, there’s not much to hold your attention, outside of the side characters Wong and Arnold throw in to liven things up — the odd pair goofy dude-bros or gun-toting mountain woman.

All the weird quirks detract from the good at the core of the film (good that nevertheless probably belongs in a different movie without under-addressed sci-fi pretentions). For instance, both Kai and Thalia present interesting examples of how people process grief — he’s an open wound, she’s a badly-healed scar. After constantly pushing people away for most of the film, our odd couple has to realize it’s not their pain that’s holding them back, but lacking someone who identifies with what they’re each going through.

We’re All Gonna Die has potential in its premise, but it doesn’t seem to know how to direct those ideas into an effective story. The movie pads a relatively simple, humane story to preposterous degrees, as if it is scared to play things straight. Characters monologue to fill the silence. A giant alien spike is there for no logical reason. Were this all whittled down to 70 or 80 minutes it might be worth a light recommendation. Unfortunately, as it is, the movie is a reminder that just because you can make a movie two hours long doesn’t mean you should.