Good luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Hey everyone, and welcome. Today, we will be talking about the film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Fun Fact: For the release of this film, they offered free tickets to individuals whose jobs were affected by AI. This film was released in 2026 and stars Sam Rockwell, Juno Temple, and Haley Lu Richardson and was created by Gore Verbinski. So without further ado lets get right into it.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die follows a man from the future who is aiming to get the right group of people to take down this AI that’s going to destroy the human race.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a science fiction comedy film filled with lots of action. It has similar vibes to Toy Story, Pluribus, or Terminator Zero.
Going into Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, I knew it was an anti Artificial Intelligence film, but I couldn’t remember the title or anything else from the trailer, but the poster was very intriguing. The movie addresses AI and how it’s running rampant with no regulation, our reliance on phones, and losing a child to school shootings. It was a weird movie, but in a good way, and surprisingly funny. One weird thing that happened before the movie was an ad from Claude about how you don’t want Ads when you use AI, and it was like two people talking, and then the AI person says an ad mid-speech, which is something that happens in the movie, which was weird to put before an anti-AI movie.
The man from the future, played by Sam Rockwell, came into this diner with a dream to find a group to help him stop this apocalypse from happening, and once you see him, it is no shock that no one wanted to believe him. This is his 117th time getting a group together, and it was interesting to see how he manages to get all these people and knows so much about them. To be honest, if I saw him, I would not go with him either. I loved his flashback to see how his mom kept him from technology, and because of this, it made him more interested, which got his mom killed and started his journey of hate against the machines. As soon as I found out Ingrid was allergic to technology, I just knew that she was his mom because she was the only person who I could see surviving and passing on to their child the horrors of AI. By the end of the film, he learns that fighting technology with technology doesn’t seem to be working, and so we need to find ways that people can just straight up ignore it.
He mentions early on that some people may die, and usually everyone dies. I had a theory that all the lesser-known actors in his group would die, and I was surprisingly correct. While it’s not really a big deal, it would’ve been surprising to see one of them actually survive. I was a little sad about Marie because she just wanted some pie and seemed so sweet.
With the characters that survive, I loved the flashbacks. With Susan played by Juno Temple, we see how she lost her son, and there is a program where you can get an AI version of your lost kid, and since it’s a school shooting, the government pays for most of it but the sales guy could care less about the situation and her son looks and sounds like her son but acts differently. One thing that made me laugh in this scene was that even if it was an option, the US government would never pay for it. She eventually tries another option that reminds her of her son and convinces her to join the group, but I felt her backstory showed how desensitized we had become to mass shootings and our lack of addressing the gun problem, and instead focusing on anything else. Mark and Janet, played by Michael Pena and Zazie Beetz, respectively, are teachers at a school where teachers are scared of kids and will randomly disappear on a sabbatical. At first, I said high school teachers don’t go on sabbatical, and then Mark said it later to point out how weird it was. They took these guns that could stun the kids for a minute, and even though this situation was not ideal, their lives were so boring, and this adventure, while scary, breathed new life into them. Ingrid, played by Haley Lu Richardson, is allergic to some technologies, which we see as it makes her nose bleed, which made me wonder if she was 11 from Stranger Things. This causes her to find a job with less interaction with that and eventually find a man who doesn’t love technology. After her boyfriend gets a VR headset, her life falls apart because he leaves her after wanting to live in that virtual world forever, and then kids start having phones, which makes her nose bleed at her job. I loved her character because she joined looking like she had nothing to lose, and looked defeated, it was just because she was having the worst day. The reveal that the future man was her son wasn’t shocking, but I’m glad that she was able to piece together the puzzle. While I enjoyed the flashbacks, I will say some were a bit long and could have been shortened.
I don’t know if it was intentional, but every time I saw the logo of this company, I just thought of a pyramid scheme. I mean, it kind of fits because these kids were benefiting this company by bringing in more bodies, but they were losing their own autonomy. There was no benefit for them, but a benefit for the AI. It also seems to mirror the random pop-up of this company as well, because some of these AI companies, like ChatGPT, seemed to just be popular one day out of nowhere.
When the future man said a 9-year-old kid was the one who would cause all this, I honestly thought they would reach the kid, and he’d be a chill kid at home. I was not prepared for this kid who’s locked in coding, on a mountain of wires. He was way more intense than I thought, and come to find out, he was one of those AI kids, so it’s like AI writing AI, which is even more creepy. I was sad that in the end, they didn’t defeat him because he needed to be stopped.
The movie had a weirdness to it that made it not only funny but also stand out. The future man already looked weird, and then you have him explaining things they encountered, which also seemed weird. As the movie goes on, it gets slightly weirder, and then it all comes to a head with the giant horse cat thing that pops out of nowhere, shooting confetti from all the crevices. It was a fun way to further drive in these messages and kept me surprised.
The monologue at the beginning was probably my favorite part of the movie. I love how he comes in and is throwing phones with perfect aim, destroying them while scaring these people. He knows so much about the people, and it’s funny to see him want some of them not to volunteer because they suck at surviving. It’s funny to see him trying to convince them while looking and speaking like a maniac, and then actually getting some to come with him. It’s a great scene to set up the movie, and later, we find that some of the people’s willingness to join isn’t as surprising as you might think. Sam Rockwell did a great job showing how it’s very serious, but he’s very quirky.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was very inventive and an interesting way to cover these topics. It had me interested to see how it would end, and while it doesn’t end in a win, I left satisfied.
