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

We’re all guilty of pulling out our phones and scrolling through stressful headlines or mind-numbing videos when we should be doing something else. We know it’s bad, but we do it anyway because it’s hard to resist when we spend so much of our time living and working on our devices. And while we understand that we would be better off spending less time in front of a screen, our extremely online society doesn’t really encourage this kind of healthy behavior.

These are some of the familiar ideas at work in Good luck, Have fun, don’t die, director Gore Verbinski’s new science fiction film about one man’s desperate fight to save humanity from an apocalyptic future where machines have taken over the world. Although the film’s premise of time travel and robot combat immediately calls for Terminator And Matrix franchises to think, Good luck, have fun, don’t die is a much stranger and more fanciful exploration of our anxieties regarding artificial intelligence.

At times the film stumbles when it attempts to comically articulate all the ways in which tomorrow’s societal collapse can be attributed to our current addictions to screens. But as disturbed as Good luckThe story of Becomes speaks directly to our present moment, constantly bombarded with brain-soothing content while being pushed to mindlessly adopt new technologies.

Located largely in present-day Los Angeles, Good luck follows an anonymous man claiming to be from the future (a surprisingly magnetic Sam Rockwell) as he holds up a restaurant and tries to convince its customers to join him on a quest to stop AI from becoming an unstoppable threat. In the time traveler’s reality, what remains of humanity has gone into hiding. At first, no one in the restaurant pays much attention to the man’s delusions. But they all start to take him more seriously when he opens his homemade time travel suit – which looks like a pile of trash he taped up – and tells them he hooked up with explosives.

Even if there’s crazy madness in the way Good luck, have fun, don’t die introducing its world-weary protagonist, the film shifts gears several times by peeking into the lives of the people he hopes will be the right people to recruit to his cause. The film feels like a C-grade horror when it flashes back to the day teachers Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Mark (Michael Peña) had while trapped in a school full of students hypnotized by a strange signal emanating from their phones. But the menacing vibes are grounded much more in relationship drama when we get a glimpse into the life of Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a woman who is struggling to hold down her job due to her unusual allergy to Wi-Fi signals.

Although he has made trips to this particular restaurant dozens of times in the past, the man from the future is not sure which combination of people is right. It’s only because he already knows so many details about them that some people start to believe that maybe he’s telling the truth. And while none of them are entirely sure this man can be trusted, Susan (Juno Temple) — a mother who recently experienced a devastating loss — feels like the things he says are directly related to the personal challenges they’ve all faced.

Matthew Robinson’s screenplay tends to be a bit overstuffed, but the film’s script Rashomon-a similar approach to unveiling his broader story gives Verbinski – whose latest film, A remedy for well-being, premiered nine years ago – plenty of room to play with his directorial style. It often relies on visual hyperactivity that echoes the physical nervousness of the future man and reflects the film’s ideas about the dangers of being overstimulated by technology. This energy works particularly well during certain periods. Good luckThere are more batshit action sequences involving creatures that feel like indictments of Generation AI slop. But the film’s most effective scenes come when Verbinski slows his camera down to give us a good look at the strangeness and dysfunction of this already-present world.

Even when Good luck, have fun, don’t die tripping over its own feet to weave its plots, the film is an inspired ride that tries to say a little more about everything that makes life in 2026 seem like it’s plunging us into an abyss. And at a time when Hollywood is rushing to get everyone to embrace the AI ​​generation agenda, it’s a relief to have someone tell us that the sky is urgently falling, even if they have a bomb strapped to their chest.

Good luck, have fun, don’t die also 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 13.