Gore Verbinski hasn’t made a movie in nine years, and his return to the big screen with a script penned by Matthew Robinson may just be one of the years most original, creative, fun, insane movies and we’re only in February. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a scathing look at society, carefully veiled in a cautionary tale from the future (a future which we currently reside in) and a menacing omnipresent villain – so why does one want to escape the reality we currently reside in, simply because the ensemble brings this terrifying look at our near future to something of fun and a world we hopefully don’t ever actually enter.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die focuses on The Man from the Future (Sam Rockwell) as he enters a diner in Los Angeles and tells everyone in the diner, he is in fact from the future, and he needs to assemble a team of diners to help him save the world. Everyone in the diner is reluctant and thinks he’s crazy but he eventually chooses a few people, and have some volunteer including Susan (Juno Temple), Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) Mark (Michael Pena), Janet (Zazie Beetz), Scott (Asim Chaudhry) and Marie (Gerogia Goodman) to stop the future from becoming a reality they cannot live in or be part of. The long and short of it is, AI is coming to destroy the world and sync us into an idiosyncratic dystopian future where as Tegan & Sara would say ‘everything is awesome’ because the AI doesn’t want you to think anything is wrong. Through a series of flashbacks and backstories, we learn the stories of Janet, Mark, Ingrid, and Susan as well as the Man from the Future’s as to what led them to this diner on this particular day, and why they are along for the adventure either by choice or not.
What makes Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die such a dystopian insane Lovecraftian nightmare adventure, aside from the cast firing on literally all cylinders is how fantastic Matthew Robinson and Gore Verbinski are creatively. Robinson crafts the near perfect script of real world terror of AI and how the world is using it to shape everything, and the possibilities he presents in the film are not something like Skynet where the AI becomes sentient and causes harm, it’s just the input we give it as a society, with no regulations, and the chaos unfolds. This is balanced with Verbinski’s hand as a director crafting the story, ensuring it is told correctly, and bringing it all together with only eyes that he has that reminds us he never lost the sauce, just hasn’t splattered a plate with it in quite some time. While having a fantastic director at the helm and a marvellous script, that only goes so far if the cast is not supporting the project overall and thankfully this ensemble delivers tenfold and helps create this horrifying new AI reality for the audience to see how terrifying it can become and maybe urge us to stop before it’s too late. Everyone in the cast is truly exceptional but it is Rockwell, Richardson, and Temple who are the true standouts between their backstories, and the weight they carry in the film as actors and characters that brings the film to new heights and levels with a balance between terror and social commentary.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die may have set off the Hollywood alarms a little too late, but the message is clear – do with that as you will and if we fall into a world that is synthetic and virtual, not allowing us to continue living in a reality that we deem our own, I wish you good luck, have fun, and don’t die.
