Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die: a wild parable about tech habit

We are all responsible of pulling out our telephones and doomscrolling by means of annoying headlines or mindnumbing movies once we ought to be doing the rest. We comprehend it’s unhealthy, however we nonetheless do it as a result of it’s exhausting to withstand when a lot of our time is spent dwelling and dealing on our units. And though we perceive that we’d be higher off with much less display time, our extraordinarily on-line society doesn’t precisely encourage that sort of wholesome conduct.

These are among the acquainted concepts at work in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, director Gore Verbinski’s new sci-fi movie a few man’s determined struggle to avoid wasting humanity from an apocalyptic future the place machines have taken over the world. Though the film’s time-travelling, robot-fighting premise instantly calls the Terminator and Matrix franchises to thoughts, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a a lot weirder and extra whimsical exploration of our anxieties about synthetic intelligence.

At occasions, the movie stumbles because it tries to comedically articulate all of the methods by which tomorrow’s societal collapse may be traced again to our current day display addictions. But as unhinged as Good Luck’s story turns into, it speaks on to our current second, continually being bombarded with brain-smoothing content material whereas being pushed to unthinkingly undertake new expertise.

Set largely in current day Los Angeles, Good Luck follows an unnamed man claiming to be from the longer term (a surprisingly magnetic Sam Rockwell) as he holds up a diner and tries to persuade its patrons to affix him on a quest to forestall AI from changing into an unstoppable menace. In the time traveler’s actuality, what’s left of humanity has gone into hiding. At first, nobody within the diner places a lot inventory within the man’s ravings. But all of them begin taking him extra significantly when he flings open his home made time journey swimsuit — which seems to be like a bunch of rubbish he’s taped collectively — and tells them he’s wired himself with explosives.

Though there’s a madcap zaniness to the way in which Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die introduces its world-weary protagonist, the film repeatedly shifts gears because it peeks into the lives of the folks he hopes are the proper people to recruit to his trigger. The movie seems like a C-tier horror when it flashes again to the day that academics Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Mark (​​Michael Peña) have had whereas trapped in a faculty full of scholars who change into hypnotized by a wierd sign emanating from their telephones. But the menacing vibes are rather more grounded by relationship drama once we’re given a glimpse into the lifetime of Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a girl who struggles to maintain a job due to her uncommon allergy to Wi-Fi alerts.

Despite having made his journey into the previous to that particular diner dozens of occasions, the person from the longer term isn’t completely sure which mixture of individuals is the proper one. It’s solely as a result of he already is aware of so many particulars about all of them that among the folks begin to imagine that he is likely to be telling the reality. And whereas none of them are totally sure that the person may be trusted, Susan (Juno Temple) — a mom who has not too long ago gone by means of a devastating loss — has a sense that the issues he’s saying tie immediately into the non-public challenges they’ve all been coping with.

Matthew Robinson’s script tends to get a bit overbusy, however the movie’s Rashomon-like method to unveiling its bigger story offers Verbinski — whose final movie, A Cure For Wellness, premiered 9 years in the past — ample area to mess around together with his directorial type. He typically leans into a visible hyperactiveness that echoes the longer term man’s bodily jitteriness and displays the movie’s concepts in regards to the risks of being hyperstimulated by expertise. That power works particularly effectively throughout a few of Good Luck’s extra batshit motion sequences involving creatures that appear to be indictments of gen AI slop. But the film’s handiest scenes come when Verbinski slows his digicam down to offer us a great take a look at simply how unusual and dysfunctional this world already is within the current.

Even when Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is tripping over its personal toes to weave its plots collectively, the film is an impressed joyride that’s attempting to say a bit bit about all the things that makes life in 2026 really feel like we’re hurtling into an abyss. And on this second when Hollywood is dashing to get everybody to embrace the gen AI agenda, it’s a reduction to see somebody inform us the sky is falling with urgency, even when he’s bought a bomb strapped to his chest.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die additionally stars Asim Chaudhry, Tom Taylor, Riccardo Drayton, Dino Fetscher, Anna Acton, Daniel Barnett, Dominique Maher, Adam Burton, and Georgia Goodman. The film hits theaters on February thirteenth.