Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die (2025)

R and for good reason.  We're in the place where a movie knows it might have a bit of a cult following.  As such, the f-word --among other swear words --flows freely.  We're going to get some pretty dark stuff, including the gory deaths of major characters.  It also shoots for an uncomfortable tone for much of the film.  One of the key motifs of the film is school shootings, which is simultaneously taken very seriously and, oddly enough, with a sense of humor.  This is a well-deserved, but interesting R.

DIRECTOR:  Gore Verbinski

I think I love this, but I'm not in love with this. 

But I don't know if I'm shocked about that.  Let's back up.  God bless Gore Verbinski for making a movie that goes so hard at AI in 2025.  Like, it's really bizarre that we've all kind of gotten to this point, considering so many of us were raised on The Terminator.  But we're also living in a world where a tech company that exclusively collects information on the American people named themselves "Palantir", so who knows what our human morality really is at.

Before I go too far, I do want to --oddly enough in a blog about a movie named Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die --talk about Pope Leo's encyclial Magnifica Humanitas.  Trust me, there's a direct connection.  I'm part of my church's social action committee.  As part of that, we're doing this breakdown of Pope Leo's first letter.  For those unaware of what Magnific Humanitas is, it's the Vatican's stance on artificial intelligence.  (See, I could have led with that, but I needed at least a sentence or two to build up suspense.) Now, I love this text.  Like, it might have gone harder than anything I've read in a long time.  He's the pope.  I get that he has the opportunity to go on the offensive.  But I haven't seen anything as intense and powerful as this encyclical.  I loved it.  It was more than simply a take on artificial intelligence --which it absolutely rips apart.  But instead, it is the reasons why artificial intelligence is so dangerous to the dignity of the human person.  

Now, I consider Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die to be the darker side of the same argument.  This is a movie that wants to be as fun as it can be while simultaneously traumatizing its audience.  That's not quite Magnifica Humanitas.  But beyond its treatus on artificial intelligence, it is also one of those movies that tries to remind us what it means to be human and how quickly we have forgotten some of our base code (pun intended) when it comes to putting humanity first.  The unnamed protagonist, in his zeal for bringing down this system that places humanity on the back foot, comes across as an anti-hero.  (Please note: you shouldn't take the unnnamed protagonist's stance completely.  He's very cool with undue loss of life, mainly because he's a time traveller who constantly resets people's deaths.) But he also, despite having a cavalier attitude towards all of the people that he meets, seems to understand that life used to mean something.  Yeah, it's a bit of low hanging fruit to show teenagers on their phones as mindless zombies.  I will talk about that later (if I remember it).  But, do you know what?   It's also wildly effective.

Okay, I'm going to talk about the teenagers now because I know I'll forget.  I usually hate when generations are crapped on by their elders.  I got a lot of that as a millennial.  I thought I would never do that.  But I also notice that empathy is at an all time low when it comes to Gen Z, at least as a high school teacher.  It's not absolute and I still want to defend Gen Z.  But I remember a time when I was teaching and my students were deeply moved by the plights of others.  But now, it's stuff like this.  All media consumed comes in small snippets that's meant to appeal to every already embraced facet of their personas.  That scene when Mark touches the screen just to see how they would react?  That scene reads as a violation because to a lot of kids, that would be a violation.  I hate that the commentary is base and old-man problems, but when it works, I guess it works.

I can't help but think that this lives in the shadow of Black Mirror.  Like, if Black Mirror never existed, would we have a Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.  I say this because the movie takes some big swings.  Because Black Mirror is an anthology show with a thematic tie of the dangers of dependence on technology, the tones can vary.  Sometimes a Black Mirror episode can be quite intimate.  Other times, we find ourselves laughing at incredibly bleak humor.  But that's kind of the tone of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die.  For the most part, this is an over-the-top film.  Rockwell's performance is so big and so perfect, it sets a pace car for some of the absolutely bananas things that happen in this film.  I mean, that's smart.  We know that Black Mirror works.  (To a certain extent.  We still have wider and wider allowances for what artificial intelligence is allowed to do, despite the fact that this show has been warning us of the dangers for more than a decade.)  

And, yeah, this movie needs to be fun, but bleak.  I actually think that this movie is doing mostly everything right.  Does it feel like a little bit of a knock-off of Black Mirror as opposed to a successor?  Yeah, kind of.  But I also think that this is a much more interesting take on AI than something like Terminator.  The thing about Terminator, as groundbreaking as Terminator was, is that it concentrated on being a great sci-fi action movie.  Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die --for all of its silliness --doesn't really let humanity off the hook.  Yes, there are action moments.  Nothing Terminator-y, but action moments nonetheless.  But the key concept that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die presents is that big explosions and stong morals aren't necessarily going to have an effect on AI.  

There was an X-Files episode a while back where Mulder and Scully discovered that there was going to be a dangerous piece of technology brought into the world and that they had to stop it.  (I barely remember this and I'm really rooting into the back of my memory to even go that far.  Because The X-Files was mostly episodic, Mulder and Scully stopped the guy from inventing that piece of tech, only to discover that someone else across the planet was having the same breakthrough.  That's kind of the point of Good Luck. Technological progress is always going to keep going.  We've proven, as a species, that we are incapable of heeding reasonable warnings when it comes to making destructive choices.  Instead, this movie ends up being a criticism more of humanity than of artificial intelligence itself.  

The film is divided into the mainplot and a series of flashbacks giving us insight into the individual members of the team and their respective horror stories when it came to artificial intelligence.  Big ups to Gore Verbinski for even sticking his toe into the school shooting epidemic that we're in now.  But one of the stories had a character who was allergic to Wifi.  (In the same way that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die knocks off Black Mirror, we can probably accuse the film of also borrowing heavily from Better Call Saul when it comes to that character beat.)  She finally finds a kindred spirit with a pizza delivery driver who embraces more of a technophobic luddite lifestyle.  But that scene also illustrates how addictive technology actually is.  (Note: Only hours ago, Meta settled a lawsuit basically admitting that it makes social media addictive to children.) 

But I have to complain.  I wouldn't be me (that's not true.  I tend to love everything too much) if I didn't point out the fact that this movie seems to hinge on a twist that is almost telegraphing itself to us.  Like, the movie goes out with a twist ending.  But I'm not sure if it was always structured that way.  The movie goes bizarre.  Truly and honestly --sometimes in the best possible way --bizarre.  There is an understanding early on that anything can and will happen in this movie.  As the team gets closer and closer to the boy's house, more and more enemies get in the team's way.  Almost because he could, Verbinski has a cat centaur act as a kaiju barrier between the team and the house.  Now, Rockwell's character straight up verbalizes that this is a lazy prompt written by an AI.  Still, somehow, Ingrid and Rockwell's character seem to have the epiphany too late that they didn't stop the AI and were horrified that they were in the system.  

Maybe there's a beat in the movie that I don't understand, but it seems like the characters just started the film in the AI.  According to Rockwell's character's rules, the AI was going to present them with things that they wanted to see and hear and give them the impression that they were defying the odds.  There is no moment where we question whether they screwed up.  Ultimately, it shouldn't matter that time travel happened.  No matter how many times Rockwell's character goes back in time, it seems like he's already in the AI.  (I'm working out my understanding about the knife wound and AI.  At first, I didn't think that the knife wound would get healed.  But if that timeline was erased, would that have stopped the knife from ever stabbing him?  I mean, he has memories of that timeline.  Why wouldn't those memories get erased if the knife never happened?  Does time travel itself cure travellers?  Who knows?  This is what I think about a lot.)

There was one thing that I hoped would be explained that never got put in there.  At one point, Darren tells Susan that there's a secret tunnel under the diner.  In that secret tunnel, it felt like a nerdy set designer decided to pay tribute to Portal by putting "The Cake is a Lie" as graffiti.  I thought that might have been too obvious, but then Darren's room had a Portal poster on it, making me think that corporeal Darren may have tagged that wall and that he wasn't part of the AI.  But, nah, it seems like people on the design team just liked Portal.  Bummer.

Anyway, I dug it, but it also seemed to not exactly have all of its rules clearly established in its own bible.  I'm still going to heavily recommend it, even if it has some beats thrown in there without explanation.