Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

A "Man From the Future" enters a diner in Los Angeles with a bomb, claiming that he is back once again, after trying and failing multiple times, to recruit the correct combination of people needed from the diner’s patrons to help him save the future from the threat of a rogue artificial intelligence.

Like Night Patrol, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is another film that had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2025. They aren’t quite the same type of movie. Fantastic Fest is eight days of parties and booze and food, where you can see about 40 movies in a weeklong celebration of genre films… horror, sci-fi, action, fantasy, noir, westerns, any ol’ “fantastic” film, especially if they are provocative, strange, ground-breaking, shocking, unique, and most importantly, “under seen.”

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die was directed by Gore Verbinski, and stars names like Sam Rockwell, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, and Juno Temple, so obviously, it’s not exactly a film that fits in the “under seen” category, and honestly, probably not in any of the provocative, strange, ground-breaking, shocking, or unique categories either, but that’s neither here nor there. My point is, there’s basically four types of films that get shown at Fantastic Fest...

Or at least, there were.

I don’t know how it is now. I’m talking about Fantastic Fest in the Before Times, pre-COVID here. Since then, Sony Pictures has purchased the Alamo Drafthouse franchise, which means they own Fantastic Fest too. Now, a few years ago, these kinds of shenanigans would’ve been considered a violation of the 1948 Supreme Court "Paramount Decision," which said that vertical integration (in this case, the producing, distributing, and exhibiting films) created an illegal monopoly, but… well, we live in corrupt times, don't we?

Anyway, there’s four types of films…

There’s repertory screenings, which are classic, cult, independent, or older films that are no longer being regularly shown. Like the year I saw Take It Out In Trade, a previously thought lost softcore porn movie directed by Ed Wood in 1970, which had only been shown in public once before, 40 years prior, supposedly in the back room of a Glendale strip club. It was awful, obviously, but I love the backstory.

Then there’s the famous Secret Screenings. These are usually yet-to-be released movies, often ones that have a lot of anticipatory buzz building about them, or are hoping to garner some. Like the 2018 version of Susperia, or Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, or the Death of Stalin. Now, usually there’s a little bit of speculation, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that. A lot of hope and buzz builds as people mill about, smoking cigarettes and drinking beers, between shows outside of the South Lamar Drafthouse, and discuss what possible film the secret screening may be. But some years, it’s the worst kept secret ever. Literally everyone will know, and if you don’t, just ask, because multiple people can’t wait to tell you and prove that they’re in the know. Crimson Peak was maybe the most widely known of all, like there was just no question. But then there's years like when it was Split. Somehow almost no one knew, and they somehow managed to keep it that way too. M. Night Shamalyan was even in attendance and gave a surprise Q&A afterwards, which was really great, and a complete surprise too. It was an experience that made me reevaluate how I see his work in general. And the best part that year was how, everyone who saw it, we all kept the secret of Split’s surprise ending.

That’s pure love of movies right there, people.

Then there’s the aforementioned “under seen” films. Surprising, unexpected, and phenomenal. You walk in almost blind and you are dazzled by some truly fantastic films. Like Issa Lopez’s story of children and ghosts and the Mexican drug war in Tigers Are Not Afraid. Jeremy Saulnier’s tale of a punk rock band versus a gang of murderous skinheads in Green Room. Or Jim Hosking’s… frankly indescribable… Greasy Strangler, and his second film, that he referred to as “the most mainstream romantic comedy he is capable of making” An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn. A long line of films, One Cut of the Dead, or Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, or Men and Chicken, or Sweetheart, or The Invitation. The Death of Dick Long. Popoz. The Platform. The Vast of Night. The pure chaos of Jallikattu. On and on. These films are the true gems of the festival, they are the entire reason you go.

Finally, there's the fourth kind... These are the “quirky” big name/big studio mainstream films, often times they're the opening or closing films of the festival, and the ones that studio executives—the kind of people who say shit like “will it play in Peoria” and mean it—think are so “weird” and “out there.” And if we’re being honest, they usually really are the kinds of film that the people in “Peoria” think are ”weird” and “out there” too. They’re usually films like Tim Burton’s dull adaptation of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, or Alexander Payne's execrable Downsizing, which is hands down the worst film I ever saw in all my years of going to the festival. But then… sometimes... sometimes they’re truly great films too, like John Wick, or Jojo Rabbit, or Parasite.

So, you take the good, you take the bad, you take ‘em both and there you have… Fantastic Fest.

Obviously, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a film from the last category. It’s a big name/big studio “quirky” mainstream film that’s “weird” and ”out there” in a pretty expected big Hollywood studio way. But to be fair, it probably won’t play in “Peoria” either, so the execs are totally wrong this time. It’s definitely no Parasite, but it’s nowhere near as bad as Downsizing either. What I'm saying is... there’s no need to worry about luck, good or bad. Because while you’ll probably have some fun, you’re definitely not in any danger of dying here, as this film doesn’t have as nearly as sharp of an edge as it thinks it does.

So…

A man arrives at a Norms diner in Los Angeles at 10:10 PM, announcing to mostly assemblage of patrons that he has arrived from the future on a mission to save the world and he needs some volunteers to help him. He explains to everyone that he needs a specific combination of diner patrons in order to succeed, but so far he has not been able to find the correct combination. But, each time he's failed, he's simply jumped back in time and tried again.

This is his 117th attempt.

Unfortunately, he looks more like a crazy bum who just wandered in off the street, and is shouting nonsense, rather a charismatic savior from the future, one that the average person is willing to risk it all on joining a desperate mission with, so no one volunteers. That's when he explains to everyone that he has a bomb, showing them all the little clicker in his hand, that is wired to his vest.

The bomb forces them to listen, but it’s his knowledge of the diner’s various patrons that convinces some of them to volunteer. Seven of them. Because seven has proven to be the best number, and seems to guarantee that at least one of them will make it all the way through the night. There’s Scott, an Uber driver, Mark and Janet, the schoolteachers, Bob, a schlubby Boy Scout leader, Marie, who was just there for some pie, Susan, who is strangely eager to be part of this, and Ingrid, who is sitting all alone at a crappy diner, clearly crying, and wearing a dirty prom dress and combat boots, so the man from the future understandably rejects her from the group for having just... way too many red flags. But then a seemingly cosmic sign makes him change his mind.

Why not? 117 times? Maybe it’s time to take some weird chances.

By this time, the police have surrounded the diner. This is the group‘s first, and often most difficult obstacle, a moment that usually results in some, if not all of their deaths. Bob is killed trying to distract the cops, but the rest of them make it out when Susan directs them to a basement that had thus far been unknown to the Future Man, where a ventilation duct that had also thus far been unknown to the Future Man, allows them to get out of the building and past the trigger-happy cops and their painfully erect little murder-boners.

The group is then chased through the back alleys and parking garages of Los Angeles by a pair of shotgun-wielding men wearing pig-themed ski masks. They manage to kill Marie before an out-of-control car runs one of them down, and a knife-weilding bum tackles the other into an open sewer.

At this point, it's time for the backstories.

Mark and Janet are teachers at a school where students are obsessed with their phones and the horrific AI images they find there. But when Mark dares to touch one of their phones, the students unite into a kind of hive mind, and follow him and Janet threateningly, cornering them in the teachers' lounge. Mark and Janet use a pair of homemade cell phone "jammer" guns, that was built by one of their frazzled coworkers, to temporarily disable the cellphones. The lose of the internet confuses the students, so the pair are able to escape, which is how they end up at the diner.

Susan's son Darren was killed in the latest school shooting, so she pays to have a clone of him made, but the clone only looks like him, it doesn’t act like him. Also, it does a lot of product placement for a fruit tea brand, and pauses constantly to tell anyone in even a vaguely military-like hat: “Thank you for your service.” At a support group meeting for parents who kids were killed in a school shooting, and whose clones were then vaguely disappointing, Susan is introduced to a different option: an AI that speaks to her through an earpiece, one that much more closely resembles who Darren was. It tells her to follow the man in the diner.

Ingrid turns out to be a young woman with a debilitating allergy to electronic devices and Wi-Fi, which causes her headaches and nosebleeds. She works as a Princess at little girls’ birthday parties, because she has less chance of running into anything that might trigger her allergy, but increasingly, the young kids are now attached to their cellphones too. Still, she thought she had at least found a kind of safe haven with her technology-hating boyfriend, Tim, a place where they could live a blissfully analog life together, but then, on that very day, the reason why she was crying in a dirty princess dress and combat boots in a diner, Tim dumped her, opting to go live in a virtual reality he claimed was better than the real world.

Finally, in the future that the man comes from, we see that he was raised by his mother, a woman whose face the film carefully refuses to show us. His life was just the two of them in a sunless post-apocalyptic world. It is a time where most of the natural resources have run out, leading to mass deaths, while humanity loses itself in Virtual Reality. The man and his mom live in a bunker in the wilderness, but the boy grows bored and restless and curious. One fateful day, he wanders away from their bunker, and finds a discarded VR headset. Unfortunately, turning the headset on alerts a nearby drone to their presence, and his mother is killed when the drone hits their bunker with a missile. He spent the rest of his life with fellow survivors and scientists, and all their efforts have now led to this, to him, in a diner, trying to find the right group of people to save the world.

The plan is…

Find a nine-year-old boy in the current present time, the one who is just about to create the AI that ends the world and wipes out humanity. But not to kill him. AI is truly inevitable, people are always chasing their own destruction, so if they kill the boy, then someone else will just eventually do what he does, and the people in the future might not know where that person is, or when they do it. So no, the plan is to collar the AI while its still in its infancy, using a safety program written by tech geniuses from the future. This program will contain the AI, ensuring it acts safely. In order to do this, in the moments just before the AI comes online, The Man from the Future must be there, and insert a USB drive containing the program.

The Man From The Future admits that he's not wearing a bomb, it's actually a Time Vest, and if he hits the clicker in his hand, it will catapult him back in time, back to the diner, and he'll start all over again.

The group ends up taking refuge in a suburban house that is empty because the family is on vacation. It is just across the street from the home of their target. It's at this point the man from the future warns them that this is as far as he has ever made it in any other attempt, that this is where they always fail, because there's an enemy’s coming for them now. It's one that has no weakness, cannot be stopped, and outnumbers them at minimum, ten to one. And it's never the same enemy. It’s different every time. Sometimes it’s cops, or armed mercenaries, or maybe meth’d-up lunatics with axes. It’s been rabid dogs. It's been an angry mob. Sometimes it's the Navy SEALS. Once, it was a million rats. Another time, it was fire. Nothing but fire everywhere. Very hot. There’s no pattern to any of it. It could be a biker gang, or the Yakuza. Your guess is as good as mine, is what he tells the others. They try to make some hopeful suggestions, like maybe it will be kittens or centaurs or a single pug, or maybe a glitter-bomb parade. The Man from the Future scoffs at them.

They gear up.

The enemy turns out to be the worst thing possible…

Hundreds of teenagers, all glued to their phones and shuffling like zombies. They surround the house and break in. Mark and Janet end up having to use themselves as bait in order to distract the teenagers so that the others can get away. It's at this point that a giant centaur made of kittens shows up and starts eating teenagers as they take their selfies, all while it's spraying everyone with glitter from its massive swinging horse cock.

It’s zany chaos on the streets, people. Zany! Oh, the humanity and the hilarity! If only the kids would put down their phones!

The Man from the Future, Susan, and Ingrid run, but before they can get to the target house, they are confronted by the masked man from earlier, who apparently survived the attack by the knife-wielding bum. His name is Doug, and he's upset about how his buddy died, and he wants revenge. They manage to talk Doug down, discovering that Doug and his buddy were paid 50k by a mysterious online contact to kill them all, and that then the pair were going to take the money and go to Japan on vacation. Then Scott runs Doug down in a stolen car.

ZANY! UNEXPECTED!

The group enter the house, and inside, they find a pair of weirdos posing as the child's parents. The fake father kills Scott, and then the Man from the Future kills him. The fake mother reconsiders her life choices and flees, warning them that it gets real fucking weird in that house.

At the end of a secret tunnel, the Man from the Future, Susan, and Ingrid finally locate their target. It's a weird little 9 year old boy, bald, and sitting atop a massive pile of wires. His eyes are glazed over, his fingers are flying across the keyboard, or occasionally eating Cheetos, all while an endless amount of indecipherable code scrolls across the wall before him.

Susan recognizes the boy as a clone, who is being directed by his programming to create the AI singularity. In essense, the AI is creating itself. When they attempt to plug in the USB drive, several repurposed cleaning robots and creepy dolls start to attack them. The group is restrained and the man is stabbed in the chest.

Ingrid fights through her allergies and prepares to plug in the protocol, but the clone boy/AI tries to dissuade her, telling her that its creation, and the future that it will bring, are inevitable. It also tells her that the Man from the Future man is her son, because she's currently pregnant with Tim's baby, and that they'll have a better life if she simply embraces the AI future.

Ingrid does what any woman who just got dumped, and who had just been crying in a diner while wearing a torn princess dress and combat boots, would do... she spits in its face, gives it the finger, and plugs in the USB, forcing the AI to reboot with the security programming.

"Fuck your future."

Staggering from the house, squining in the morning light, the group finds that everything is right with the world, the sun is shining, and it's a brand new day. But is it real? Did they really win? Finally? Or did the AI just give them a fake happy ending in order to keep them all compliant?

Was this reality created from AI prompts...

I love Time Loop movies.

Groundhog Day. Terminator. Edge of Tomorrow. Palm Springs. Source Code. 12 Monkeys. The 12 Monkeys tv show. Happy Death Day. Happy Death Day 2U. The Endless. The Final Girls. See You Yesterday. Looper. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things. That Natasha Lyonne Netflix show, Russian Doll. La Jetee, obviously...

(Have you seen La Jetee? I have. No big deal.)

These are just a few films from the Time Loop genre. The quality can vary wildly, of course, but one of my favorite things about this genre is how they’re often about the journey to enlightenment, and how this allows a soul to be freed from the cycle of death and rebirth, to achieve liberation from all karma, and the suffering that it causes, and to ascend to Heaven. Metaphorically, of course, at least, in the case of the Time Loop genre. Here, instead of ascending to heaven, they usually just break out of the Time Loop.

That’s what Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is, a time loop movie, kind of like Groundhog’s Day meets 12 Monkeys meets Terminator. It's the story of a man stuck in a seemingly Sisyphean cycle, trying again and again to save his own soul, and thus, save the world, but he is doomed to walk the same path again and again, sacrificing others over and over, stepping over an endless line of corpses, only to be faced with the same truth every time… that we’re responsible, we are the ones who create our own destruction. It’s a good idea, and it’s well-executed.

It's maybe a little too "zany" for my tastes, but overall, it’s not too bad.

It’s creative, definitely. It’s fun. It’s funny. But it’s a little overly-pleased with its very deliberate and loud quirkiness, y’know? The cast is great, and Sam Rockwell especially really brings some great energy to the whole thing, but there’s a lot more razzmatazz and jazz hands to the whole presentation than I’d prefer. But that having been said, I do like the vehement anti-AI message. That’s a rare thing these days, especially in Hollywood, when every useless asshole is shoving that shit into more and more stuff. In fact, if you stream this, and you’re not on an Ad Free plan, you’re probably going to be inundated with a bunch of horrendously ugly anti-art AI-generated ads while doing so. That BAERSkin hoodie commercial is a god damn crime against humanity, and it's not the only one out there either.

We’re drowning in the shit.

So I really appreciated that the main thrust of this film is that AI, at least in the application that is being marketed to us so relentlessly these days, is fucking bad, and that using it, especially for “menial“ tasks, only makes you stupid.

Yes, it’s true that AI is currently reason number eight hundred and thirty thousandth, nine hundred and twelfth on the list of reasons why we’re living in the worst fucking timeline, but because of the wild-eyed, white-knuckled investment in AI by seemingly every corporation and institution out there, all because a bunch of obvious con men stroked the right egos, so now they've all gone "all in" with no exit plan on this dubious and useless bit of tech that is not producing any returns, we're now standing on the edge of industry bubble that is about to burst, bringing with it the type of collapse that will crater our economy, or at least, what’s left of it... if we survive Trump.

But even if it wasn’t going to lead to an economic apocalypse, you’d think, or at least… you’d hope, that the profound ethical and legal issues that the use of these GenAI models present would be more than enough to keep people away.

You’d think that the way AIs scrape and steal people's data would be more upsetting to these assholes, the same people who throw a fit whenever they have to leave a credit card on file, but... apparently not. You'd assume the fact that running these large AI models, even just for the small tasks, requires a significant drain on resources, and that it's often poisoning disenfranchised communities, would upset people more, the same people whose entire personality is about vaccines being bad and how "natural remedies" like raw milk are good, but... apparently not. You'd think, what with their little etsy store side hustles and their self-published books, people would be upset at the fact that AI-produced content depends upon stealing copyrighted material without any kind of payment, or even credit, but... apparently not. You’d think the fact that AIs don’t even do what they’re supposed to do would make these people a little more upset, the same assholes who fucking lose it if they think a waiter is too slow at Chili's, but nope... apparently this isn't a concern. And you would expect that all those fuckers who claim to be so concerned with "unfair" systems like DEI or "transwomen in sports" would be more upset that every single large AI model produces a high number of errors, especially as the only people who can identitfy when this happens are the ones with the "unfair" advantage of already knowing the answer, but again... nope, apparently this is not an issue either.

Honestly, I can understand how a person who would think "writing an email" is such an arduous task that they need to be relieved of it by a robot, wouldn't give a shit about any of this. They're Human Centipedes of Selfishness. They only care about themselves. They only care about right now. I understand why they wouldn't care that the inevitable degradation of critical thinking and analytical skills is a net loss for humanity.

I understand it, but I don't get it...

How is it not apparent to these people how bad it is for society that, when AI provides a person with answers, whether right or wrong (usually wrong) it robs them of the knowledge and experience and understanding needed to replicate the process of obtaining those answers? How does that not terrify them? How do they not see the inevitable future where no one knows how to do something, and only a machine we no longer know how to build or program does, all while no one can actually verify whether or not it's even right?

Why don't they see that as bad?

I suppose the answer lies in their apparent inability to identify AI "art" or to understand that AI has zero creativity and no self-awareness, that it has no soul, that it’s “art” will never be anything but ugly and completely devoid of all meaning. I suppose the answer lies in the fact that they not only don't care that AI "art" is fucking garbage, they actually prefer it.

So, yeah, I appreciate that this film says it clearly... AI makes you stupid. AI is bad for people, it’s bad for the world, and it’s bad at its job. It can only make the world worse. I also appreciate that the film clearly understands that this is also a battle that we will ultimately lose, because the only thing most people are more than fucking stupid, is lazy as shit.

But at the same time…

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die was initially a television pilot titled Don't Trust Anyone Under 30, which... is an exhausting and dumb title that angers me just by existing. The proposed series was about a teacher and his attempts to connect with students over books, but when it's main point was just "old man shouts at clouds" and that turned out to not be enough to support an entire series, it was then turned into this movie. And it's a movie that the director claims was inspired by films like Repo Man, Akira, and Dog Day Afternoon, which, to be fair, is obvious onscreen, if not in meaning, then aesthetically. The Director also specifically mentions in his bio that he was a "punk-rock guitarist as a teenager and had to sell his guitar to buy his first camera."

This all makes me sad.

Aging is hard for some people, and they don't carry it very well, and sometimes, it curdles in them, and it makes them do dumb and embarassing things as they rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Director Gore Verbinski is 62 years old. He’s famous for such films as Pirates of the Caribbean, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead’s Man Chest, The Lone Ranger, The Weather Man, and Rango. Writer Matthew Robinson is 47. His past works include The Invention of Lying, Monster Trucks, and Love and Monsters. One of them is an old man, and is perhaps a bit bitter after a string of disappointing recent flops. The other is probably feeling the undeniable inevitability of being an old man, and is perhaps also a little bit bitter because none of their projects were enough of a hit that their later projects could be called flops in comparison. And that’s basically the whole problem with this film…

There's too much "old man-ism" to it.

It’s that, “back in my day we used to walk ten miles to school, uphill both ways, carrying our milk in our hands,” shit. That’s the overall feeling here, except that it specifically focuses on how social media is bad, and how kids these days are just internet zombies glued to their phones, and blah, blah, blah, a complaint that is not just boring, but also feels about 10 years out of date, making it extra tedious. You're still talking about this? Isn’t it time for Wheel, Grandpa? Why not have a seat in your recliner and I’ll get you some of those mashed bananas that you like…

Way too often, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die just feels like a Gen X parent whining about their Zoomer child. It’s basically the entire premise of the movie, and that’s kind of annoying. It's annoying because, I mean... yeah, on some levels, from some angles, all its ranting is not entirely wrong, but it's also not right in so many ways, important ways, mostly the extra annoying ones, but also embarassing ones. Especially coming from Gen Xers, a generation who has sadly mostly proven over the past decade plus that they have NOT learned any lessons from the failings of the previous generations, and have instead chosen to double-down on all of the mistakes we hated. I mean, have some pride, you assholes. You sound like fucking boomers. So yeah, that's my main problem here...

This film mostly just annoyed me.

Taking place in a world of exaggerated soullessness, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a satire that is as subtle as a sledgehammer. Oddly paced, mostly due to its episodic flashbacks derailing the main story’s energy, the film is still fun at times, but it’s a little too “try hard” for too much of it. It’s a little too deliberately “kooky." It's a little too “edgelordy.” And that's too bad, because there's creativity, and some good ideas here. But even if it’s a little too annoying at times, it doesn’t flinch from showing that, much like ChatGPT and GenAI, the film's AI-God/bad guy is nothing more than an evil twisted version of ourselves, and I did like that. So… Not bad. Not good either. But not bad.

If you're gonna watch this, wait until it's streaming for free.