Review: The Film, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die…

How do you conclude a darkly comic science-fiction cautionary tale without resorting to a wildly absurd, open-ended time loop? You can’t, really. Any other options threaten to readjust reality, if not at least viewers’ temporary perspectives. Yet once in a while, you’ll find one with such an ominous lesson to impart, you’ll rethink your everyday behaviors and customs. Perhaps for longer than a moment. 

What other purpose would a morality tale serve if not to warn us? If not to persuade us to breathe easy, stop and think, and reevaluate things? If not to inform us that our dependencies and idiosyncrasies may, if left unchecked, lead us to our doom? Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025) is just such a darkly comic science-fiction cautionary story with chilling implications and a timely warning. 

The film combines dark humor and sci-fi satire, following a time traveler (Sam Rockwell, Six Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri) trying to avert an AI-driven apocalypse while critiquing society's complacent embrace of technology. He bursts into a Los Angeles diner and takes its patrons hostage, assembling an unlikely band of misfits for his desperate mission.

The assembled misfits are walking cautionary tales, themselves. There’s Mark and Janet (Michael Peña, American Hustle, and Zazie Beetz, Atlanta), two overburdened high school teachers who fight a technological battle of their own. There’s Susan (Juno Temple, Roofman), a grieving mother who can’t understand why specific atrocities happen over and over again. Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson, Columbus), a lost soul allergic to technology, is crushed by her live-in boyfriend’s sudden and unexplainable departure. Asim Chaudhry (The Sandman) plays Scott, a Doubting Thomas with questions that at times reroute the quest entirely. 

The chilling implications include our addiction to smartphones. As a teacher, I am so sick and tired of battling student cell phone usage that, despite state and school rules, I completely ignore it and just teach. Students who wish to learn will learn. But it is a problem. Just look at the number of car accidents nationwide that were caused by this. The other implication is our complacency as a people, which is directly connected to the first. Indeed, we often become overly dependent on automated systems, diminishing our vigilance, weakening critical thinking, and surrendering personal judgment. I am a main offender of said complacency, since I tire of convincing a student that what I teach is more important than what they’re scrolling through on their phones. 

The film is helmed by Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) who uses his chaotic, visually frenetic energy to return to his make-chaos-make-sense approach to good effect here. Yet Matthew Robinson's (Love and Monsters) script suffers from strained eccentricity, uneven episodic pacing, and a dependence on contrived, video game-like storytelling devices. Some critics argue that the film suffers from an overstuffed narrative, a disjointed flashback-heavy structure, and a polarizing third act that strains credibility. 

As with all cautionary tales, unfortunately, this film offers only warnings, not solutions or guidance. As a result, I am unsure whether I am satisfied with this film or not. Indeed, watching the film affected me on an almost visceral level—for the first two thirds, anyway—but I was left merely entertained, not shocked into readjusting my worldview. Since I knew of the film’s warnings beforehand, for I live them every day, I was not left with that raw understanding, that awakening of thinking that accompanies pieces like Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”, or Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon. 

I recommend this film as a one-off, not a keeper.