Sometimes, you just have to scream. Gore Virbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean, Rango) has come roaring back into cinemas with the apocalyptic-now, time-travel action-comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It’s not perfect, but it is a rollicking, timely sci-fi film, and the second great Sci-fi B-Picture of the 2020’s (after No One Will Save You (2023)). It stars Sam Rockwell (Iron Man 2, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) as Man From The Future, a fast-talking time-traveler who interrupts a diner full of LA denizens with a call-to-action: who will step up to stop the AI apocalypse?
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is out in theaters today, Friday February 13th.
Sam Rockwell in Gore Verbinski’s 2026 Sci-fi Action-Comedy GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE. Image courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment.
Progress is only progress if it makes things better. Otherwise its a mistake.
Like Chat-GPT, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die actually has very little to do with any kind of artificial intelligence outside of marketing. Instead, they are both about the abdication of intelligence and responsibility, and the endgame function of the smart internet. Centering Act 1 in a Norm’s diner in Los Angeles, California, the cast is full of Americans wrestling with despair and responsibility. Michael Peña (Moonfall, A Million Miles Away) and Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2, Joker) are a pair of teachers wrestling with their class’s phone addictions. Juno Temple (Ted Lasso, Atonement) is a woman avoiding grief. Haley Lu Richardson (Split, Columbus) is a Princess-for-hire trying not to end it all. The movie shoots itself out of a canon when Rockwell bursts into the diner and declares that he is from the future, the world is ending, and he has been Groundhog Day-ing this night hundreds of times to find the right combination of patrons to help him save the world.
His 13-minute sales pitch is the highlight of the movie, though the rest is very good and riotously fun despite 20 minutes of sag in the middle of Act 3. Rockwell gives the performance you’ve been waiting for him to give, overwhelming the crowd with charisma and hard questions about the times we live in. The film is purposefully ugly as sin, violent, mean-spirited, absurd, judgmental, and glorious.
A lost, great tradition in Hollywood cinema is the Sci-fi B-picture. These films are often shaggy in form, uneven in casting, and hold their plot together with a net rather than a solid canvas. But they matter. They remix the problems of our time into light-fair entertainment. The War of the Worlds (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1971), Miracle Mile (1988) and The Purge (2013) all influence this film. This film markets itself as anti-AI, but it would be more apt to say that it is a seminal film in the opposition to the smart internet.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is not the first good film to interrogate the impact the internet has on our minds. 8th Grade (2018), Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Eddington (2025), and even Matrix: Resurrections (2021) have investigated our algorithmic present. But only this film brings to mind one of the most important and overlooked texts of our moment: the essay I Think the Internet Wants to be My Mind from Evan Puschak’s (Nerdwriter) book of essays, Escape Into Meaning (2022).
I Think the Internet Wants to be My Mind rollicks across Screen Time Weekly Reports, the Cigarette Crisis, Neuroscience, and a harrowing recounting of the morning the trailer for Cats (2019) dropped. One line early in the essay hits what all previous anti-Internet films hit:
“The modern world is built to obliterate restraint and technology enthusiastically leads the way.”
It’s a solid line about the structural issue that the internet turbocharges. All one has to do is watch the screaming match between the Attorney General and Congress this week to see that restraint has left all areas of our lives, except perhaps from the courage of the average American. But it goes deeper. It is the conclusion of the recounting of the day the Cats trailer dropped that shifts the heart and mind of the reader. Emphasis added:
”As time went on, I’d be able to refine that judgment. The internet's feelings are complex, but not infinitely varied. The more you consume the flow of tweets, videos, articles, comments, the easier it gets to bracket the complexity and understand its outer limits. And when you understand what the internet thinks, you understand what it’s okay to say. And when you understand what’s okay to say, you can add your part to the symphony, you can collect your likes, you can smother incompatible views.
Or you can just watch,
And let the internet flow through you.
And let the internet become you.”
If the internet is an addiction, “…let the internet flow through you” is the sentence that should scare us into attending the metaphorical meeting. In Repo Man (1984) and Good Morning (1959), televangelists and the line “someone said TV will create 100 million idiots” document the moral panic that surrounded Television's arrival. It is easy to scoff at the moral panic around phones as easily as TV, after all, TVs are for many people, just entertainment machines. But for many more, through the invention of 24hr opinion writing disguised as news, the television is instead a consensus machine. A substance to be controlled on the level of alcohol. Today, we are facing a substance more analogous to heroin.
At first glance, the internet also seems like a consensus machine. Social media, YouTube, Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic, GoodReads, Amazon’s Best Seller List, SEO rankings. These things are dressed up as discourse tabulators. They are not. The interface and back-end of the internet is different than Television, which sees its run of show curated by men in offices. The internet in contrast, is the product of a black box engineered like the Big Mac to maximize craving. The opinions flow through you, replacing thought and wetting your appetite to replace more.
The smart internet is a dissociation machine, and we live in the era of dissociation. When driving. When scrolling. When working. When watching “historic events” in real-time. When considering where you’ll live in 2045. When sheltering in place, when bored, when horny, when we’re eating, when we’re swiping. Nothing is real, nothing is faceable, nothing is now. Nothing but profit is required of us. We are responsible for nothing. We are abdicating life itself.
Eddington (2025) will explain to our children what 2020 was like. But it is Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die that tries to explain what happened next. A man I knew died on a ventilator, trying to scream about how Democrats were murdering him, because a few years earlier, Jeffery Epstein got together with the founder of 4chan and invented Qanon. And both political parties let it slide. More than a million Americans died, many just like that, their roles as parents, children and professionals unreplaced. In response, just like in the wake of the Spanish Flu and other economic upheavals before, the world is relapsing into facism. The world is grieving, the world is dissociating, the world is seeking easy escapes. But it feels worse this time, because it is. We are chugging gasoline while the water boils.
This film is an action-comedy, and the humor of it is its magic. What else can you call the chilled laughter evoked when Michael Peña’s teacher is flabbergasted by dozens of teenagers scrolling TikTok inside an active-shooter bunker, except a magic trick? Laughter is good medicine, and writer Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters, Dora and the Lost City of Gold) locates the absurdity in our grief, our fear, and our anger more often than he misses. When the film could slide into “old man yells at cloud” territory, the tracks he laid swerve back into clear-eyed humor, dragging the LAPD, the bi-partisan side-stepping on gun control and climate, the emotional vapidity of the rich, and the gendered violence of Silicon Valley, gamers, and meme culture.
This is a film meant to raise alarms and relieve tension. It is effective at both. It is not meant to induce moral panic, but to cut through it. There is an ongoing bipartisan effort to enforce ID age verification to access the internet, in the name of children’s safety. This is happening because all the good things the internet has wrought - greater awareness of and solidarity in the face of social injustice and global events - are seen as inefficiencies, mistakes, in the dissociation machine. Incompatible views must be smothered so that the internet can flow through you. This moral panic is working because we all know children shouldn’t go through that. This moral panic is working because we gave it to them anyway. This moral panic is working because we keep giving it to ourselves. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die asks instead: what’s the right way to take it away?
Final Score: 4/5
Find a screening at www.goodluckhavefundontdiemovie.com