Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

 

This blood-curdling film warns us about the future of mankind. Ignore it at your peril

A time-traveller from 50 years hence tries to prevent an AI apocalypse in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is the first film from Gore Verbinski since his handsome, sprawling, frustrating gothic horror A Cure for Wellness in 2016, and the original Pirates of the Caribbean director has clearly spent the intervening decade sharpening his cutlass.

Its hero, of sorts, is a nameless time-traveller, played by Sam Rockwell, who lands in the present from around half a century hence. He bears a dire warning for, well, us: the algorithmic and generative artificial intelligence that’s keeping us glued to our devices is about to advance to a level that sets a sort of content-led apocalypse in motion, unless its powers can be curbed that very night.

With his tangled beard, novelty backpack and clear plastic trench coat wrapped in old wires, Rockwell looks every inch the classic homeless lunatic. But as he sets out the stakes to the customers of a Los Angeles diner, enough of his message clicks for half a dozen to agree, trepidatiously, to join him in his quest. He knows some of them will – and that some of them will die by doing so – because he has been here before. In his prior 100-odd visits, he has never come close to defeating the tech, but there is a reason the film is about this one.

Matthew Robinson’s screenplay, smart but never show-offy, spends enough time with the volunteers via flashbacks for their courage really to count. All have recently been troubled by tech in ways that are simultaneously absurdly parodic and grimly recognisable.

High school teachers Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz contend with classrooms of teenagers literally hypnotised by their phones. Grieving mother Juno Temple is offered various tech-based reincarnations of her late son, though she has to pay extra for a version “without ads”. A children’s entertainer with a unique technology allergy (Hayley Lu Richardson) struggles at work as smartphones colonise pre-teen parties.

Juno Temple plays a grieving mother lured by AI recreations of her late son

These satirical detours initially suggest Verbinski is serving up a Black Mirror-like cautionary anthology, with each chapter mocking the notion that any sort of benefit of the doubt might be owed to technologies that make our lives measurably weirder and worse. But each thread eventually ties back wittily to Rockwell’s mission, which only grows odder and more disturbing as it goes.

In that respect, the plot has something in common with AI’s own sham artistic output, the queasy horrors of which are brilliantly mimicked here by Verbinski’s (all human, he has assured us) visual effects team. It is grippingly unpredictable – a film with a glint in its eye and smoke curling from its nostrils and underpants. But you dismiss it, or miss it, at your peril.