Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die: A Tech Parable for Our Times

It’s a common modern ritual: reaching for a phone to scroll through an endless feed of stressful news or trivial videos, often when we should be focused on something else entirely. We recognize this habit isn’t healthy, yet the pull is powerful in a world where so much of life and work happens through screens. Director Gore Verbinski’s new sci-fi film, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, taps directly into this collective anxiety, weaving a bizarre and whimsical narrative about a man’s frantic mission to save humanity from a machine-dominated apocalypse. While its time-travel and robot-fighting premise might evoke classics like The Terminator, this film carves its own peculiar path, examining how our present-day digital dependencies could seed tomorrow’s collapse.

The story unfolds primarily in a Los Angeles diner, where an unnamed man from a grim future, played with captivating intensity by Sam Rockwell, stages a hold-up. His real goal isn’t money, but recruitment. He desperately needs the diner’s patrons to help him prevent artificial intelligence from becoming an unstoppable force. In his reality, the remnants of humanity are in hiding. Initially, the customers dismiss him as a lunatic, but their skepticism wavers when he reveals a makeshift time-travel suit, a chaotic bundle of taped-together junk, and confesses he’s wired with explosives.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die possesses a madcap energy, but it frequently shifts tone as it delves into the lives of its potential recruits. The film flirts with horror in flashbacks showing teachers Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Mark (Michael Peña) trapped in a school where students fall into a trance from a mysterious phone signal. It grounds itself in poignant drama through Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a woman whose unusual allergy to Wi-Fi signals makes holding a job nearly impossible. Despite having visited this diner moment dozens of times, the time traveler isn’t sure which combination of people is the right one. It’s his inexplicable knowledge of their personal lives that begins to sway them. Susan (Juno Temple), a mother grappling with a recent tragedy, senses a connection between his warnings and the private struggles they all face.

The screenplay by Matthew Robinson sometimes feels overstuffed, yet its Rashomon-like structure of revealing the larger plot gives Verbinski creative room to experiment. After a nine-year hiatus since A Cure for Wellness, the director employs a visually hyperactive style that mirrors the protagonist’s jittery demeanor and underscores the film’s themes about technological overstimulation. This frenetic approach shines during the movie’s more outrageous action set pieces, which feature creatures that seem like a direct critique of generative AI output. However, the most compelling moments arise when Verbinski slows down, holding a lens on the subtle strangeness and dysfunction already permeating our current world.

Even when the narrative threads strain under their own weight, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die remains an inspired and urgent ride. It aims to comment on the myriad forces making contemporary life feel like a headlong rush into chaos. At a time when popular culture often pushes an uncritical embrace of new technology, the film’s alarmist heart feels like a necessary counterpoint, a warning delivered with chaotic conviction, even if it comes from a man with a bomb strapped to his chest. The film also features Asim Chaudhry, Tom Taylor, and Haley Lu Richardson, and is scheduled for release in theaters on February 13.

(Source: The Verge)