Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die Evaluate

Sam Rockwell appears to be like to be having the time of his life on this good, biting satire from Gore Verbinski.  Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a screwball sci-fi romp that step by step reveals itself as a vastly efficient war-cry in opposition to AI and the hollowness of the fashionable world.

Rockwell’s unnamed time-traveler crashes into present-day Los Angeles with a warning he’s delivered over a 100 occasions earlier than. The “bomb” on his chest is a reset button. He’s caught in a loop, replaying the identical recruitment pitch in a diner, looking for the suitable mixture of misfits to assist him save humanity. Rockwell performs him like a deranged avenue preacher who finds himself main the battle in opposition to human extinction

The movie’s tonal whiplash remembers Everything Everywhere All at Once, one other film that weaponised absurdity to discover existential dread. Verbinski’s movie leaps between slapstick and extra profound themes, however the place Everything Everywhere finds hope in radical empathy, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is extra skeptical about saving humanity from its personal selfishness.

There’s additionally a streak of the grotesque whimsy of Jennet and Caro’s Delicatessen within the manufacturing design all through. The diner looks like a sealed ecosystem of eccentrics, every character heightened however heartbreakingly human. Verbinski shoots them with a cartoonist’s eye, then undercuts the caricature with real social commentary.

Most strikingly, the movie shares DNA with 12 Monkeys. Like Terry Gilliam’s time-loop nightmare, this story traps its protagonist in cycles that blur destiny and futility. Rockwell’s traveler, resigned but compulsive, looks like a cousin to Bruce Willis’ haunted messenger. Both movies ask whether or not foreknowledge is a present or a curse, and whether or not making an attempt to vary the longer term is itself a part of the design.

Elsewhere,  Haley Lu Richardson provides Ingrid a fragile, ferocious sincerity; her “allergy” to AI hallucinations may have been a joke, however Richardson turns each nosebleed into an act of resistance. Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz, as Mark and Janet, carry a lived-in heat that makes their characters’ important to the mission. Juno Temple lends Susan a quiet ache that deepens the movie’s emotional stakes as a mom grieving the dying of her solely baby in a faculty taking pictures.

Varbinski’s message is obvious – even when it’s generally a bit of on too on the nostril – AI presents the consolation of countless resets, curated realities and prompt gratification. But whereas resistance is perhaps futile, it stays our most human trait. To select the battle and to like and be beloved is what makes us human and nothing can ever change that.