‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’

Warning: Includes SPOILERS for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die!

Towards the end of Gore Verbinski’s gonzo time travel anti-AI dystopia adventure Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the remaining survivors of a group of diner patrons who have taken on the sacred duty of saving the world from its doomed future are treated to an unimaginable sight. The misfit team’s fearless leader, a nameless time-traveling weirdo played by Sam Rockwell, has made innumerable trips back in time to search for “the right group,” remixing these strangers in endless iterations to find the one that might fix everything. It all seems to be going okay, right up until this moment.

You know how H.P. Lovecraft, master of the chillingly monstrous depiction of cosmic evil, balked at merely describing in words the appearance of his foulest creations? That’s how I feel attempting to describe the computer-generated giant giraffe whose long snakelike neck is made up of hundreds of large cats topped by an even larger cat head. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, that description barely does it justice.

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It’s both a remnant of those tranquil early days of “artificial intelligence” where programs that were taught to “dream” would instead “hallucinate” a miasma of dogs, and a pretty accurate digital recreation of something you might have already seen in an AI-generated cryptid TikTok. Despite its bizarre appearance (and, truly, it’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen in a film), it also felt creepily familiar. As someone who despises AI in all its forms, I wondered uncomfortably if it was indeed created with image-generating software—but something about the purpose with which the giraffe-cat-monster-thing moves around and focuses its enormous eyes encouraged me to believe otherwise. Still, it was a sight I certainly and unfortunately recognized, as AI itself has become basically inescapable on the Internet as a whole, integrated into search engines, email programs, and uncanny social media videos.

That knowledge of what we’re up against when it comes to separating fake from real is exactly what drives the action of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a movie that perfectly encapsulates what it’s like to go about our days trying and failing to fight back against a soulless, formless intruder. A group of schoolteachers find themselves at war with zombified phone-obsessed teens. A mother whose son was killed in a school shooting finds herself taken under the wing of an Eyes Wide Shut-style cabal of parents obsessed with cloning their kids. A woman who’s allergic to wi-fi despairs when her boyfriend becomes addicted to a VR headset. As it cycles through its multitude of subplots, each one more absurd than the last, the film has the same manic energy as your average scroll through Instagram Reels: What am I looking at? What’s going on? Is any of this actually happening? Is any of it real? Does it matter?

Well, yes, of course it matters, as the movie makes abundantly clear by the time it gets around to its Akira-esque climax. Whether or not the majority of its throw-everything-at-the-wall plotting actually works in its favor (the Gore Verbinski promise), Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die does manage to weave all of its disparate threads together in an appropriately cathartic Big Moment. What it all comes down to is a child’s love for his mother and his desperate attempts to make sure she lives and keeps on living—a sentiment that any child of any loving parent would share. It’s the one thing that the all-powerful machine-god can’t handle. Human love is as organic as it gets.

It’s this commitment to championing the strength of human perseverance that keeps Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die from straying too close to the cruel bummer energy of something like Black Mirror, the kind of media that seeks to punish us for our obsession with technology rather than offer us a way out. This movie, of course, does end on a goofy yet downer note, as the characters realize that their attempts to stop the AI have failed once again, but it’s inspirational rather than defeatist. What do you do when you’re facing an unwinnable fight? You keep finding ways to fight back. What else are you going to do?

While reminding us that we create our own dystopias—in fact, the diner gang’s main objective, as it turns out, is to stop a child from programming the AI bot that will take over the world—Verbinski’s film takes pains to point out that it’s our choice whether or not we succumb to it. Either we hold the line, persisting in deriding AI-generated “art” as the slop it is, or we give up and accept deepfaked politicians and phony “heartwarming interspecies friendship” animal videos as the new normal. The diner patrons who get swept up in all this, finding themselves at the front line of an unwinnable war, choose their side, deciding against all odds not to go gentle into that good night.