"Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is Relevant

It's not often that you see a film as timely as "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die," which pits a motley collection of LA residents against an evil AI in a battle for the future.  It's not just that the film takes aim at social media, screen addiction, and ad-filled subscriptions replacing human interactions, but it captures the uneasy feeling of always having to question whether what you're seeing is real or not, in the age of large language models generating AI slop and online grifters constantly trying to hijack your attention.  "Eddington" tackled similar subject matter last year, but was focused on the proliferation of relatively grounded misinformation and conspiracy theories.  "Good Luck" is much zanier and more unhinged, where reality itself seems to be in danger of total collapse.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The movie starts with an unnamed man, played by Sam Rockwell, barging into a busy Norm's restaurant one night, claiming that he's from a dystopian future.  He threatens to blow them all up unless six people come with him to save the world.  However, as the night goes on and we get to know all the characters better through a series of flashbacks, it looks like everyone is living in a dystopia already.  School teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz) have to deal with phone-addicted students who seem to be turning into zombies.  Susan (Juno Temple) is grieving her teenage son Darren (Riccardo Drayton), who she's been able to get a clone replacement for.  Ingrid (Hayley Lu Richardson) is allergic to electronics, and was recently ditched by her partner Tim (Tom Taylor), when he became obsessed with a VR game.

Stylistically, "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is taking a lot of influence from "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," particularly the low budget effects work and the chaotic storytelling.  There are lots of absurd, whimsical elements, like Ingrid spending the whole mission in a princess dress, that help to lighten the tone and increase the silliness of some pretty dark material.  The time traveler claims that he's come back to the same night in the diner over and over again, looking for the right combination of participants and tactics to complete his mission, so he's constantly talking about his failed attempts where people died horribly.  The whole Susan subplot comes about because school shootings are common in this universe, and there is some very black humor dealing with parents cloning their dead kids.  

"Good Luck" is very reminiscent of the "Black Mirror" anthology episodes in many respects, so I'm predisposed to like it.  However, what gives the movie a real kick is that it's also the return of Gore Verbinski to the director's chair after a decade-long absence.  This is a man who understands how to put together an action sequence that feels epic, and how to evoke horror vibes from the most innocuous situations.  I also appreciate how he leans into the oddity and the unreality of many sequences.  "It feels like AI" has been a popular criticism of a lot of media over the past year, since ChatGPT and its ilk have invaded the internet, and "Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die" is one of the first movies I've seen that turns this into a plot point.  I have no idea how long the movie has been in production, but it feels eerily prescient, and I'm very curious how well it's going to age.   

If you're primarily interested in the entertainment value, I had fun.  The cast is mostly made up of rock-solid character actors who have no trouble handling the humor or the wild hairpin turns of the plotting, and the production looks pretty polished in spite of the limited budget.  I'd have liked the movie to be a little longer or more tightly written, so we could have gotten more time with some of the characters - Asim Chaudhry's Uber driver, Scott, for instance, didn't feel like he got a fair shake - but that's likely a matter of taste.  There's just enough existential trippiness that the people who like treating movies like puzzles will have a grand time trying to figure out how much was real, and how all the little loose ends connect.  If you just want to see fights and explosions and flashing lights, there are quite a few of those here too.  

And it ends on a hopeful note, which I appreciate.

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