By Dolores Quintana
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a demented fairy tale that is at once completely irreverent and filled with a hearty love of humanity. It extols the resilience of the human spirit, but spits fire at the enemies of the soul, in what feels like a live-action Addams Family cartoon that starts in a Norm’s Restaurant.
The restaurant is the film’s anchor, so much so that someone from the screening handed me a sheet of coupons to Norm’s with the film’s logo on the back. They are very serious about Norm’s.
The film stars Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Tom Taylor, and Juno Temple, who rock the comedic aspects of the film as easily as they lift the sadness and tragedy. Everyone does great work and is memorable, but Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, and Juno Temple are those who are hit with tragedy, and you can see that emotion in their eyes and feel it in your heart.
Rockwell’s performance is very vulnerable, more vulnerable than I have ever seen from the actor. You can see who his character is and who he was.
Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, and Asim Chaudhry handle the overt comedy, and Chaudhry, in particular, is an adorably dense “red shirt” who still won’t give up. Peña and Beetz are cute as buttons as they do their best to stay alive because they have already witnessed the terror of the electronic beast, and they are teachers.
The film is at war with those tech bros who want to claim creativity for themselves through “AI”, which really isn’t “AI” and is something they will never understand. The masters of LLM see art as something else they can buy, control, and thus control the rest of the populace. They can claim that making art is as simple as writing a prompt, but they are so far removed from artistry that all they can produce is slop.
They have no love of art, only contempt for what they don’t understand and cannot achieve. They do have a primitive understanding of the importance of art to human beings, which is why they want it. Power. Also, an electronically anesthetized populace will never fight back.
None of them feels art in their bones, so that even if it were possible, they could never code a program that can truly create art. It calls to mind the quote from an IBM company training manual from 1979, “A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore, a computer must never make a management decision.”
The creation of art is a management decision. Also, how about not putting AI in charge of nuclear weapons systems? We’ve seen that movie before. The director Gore Verbinski said, in a Hollywood Reporter article, “Send some shit through a black hole; do something that we can’t do. Or dig a ditch; do the shit we don’t want to do. Why is it coming after the stuff that we essentially need to do to be human beings?”
But that’s not all that the film from Verbinski has in mind, in his first film since 2016’s A Cure for Wellness. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die shows the people who refuse to deal with reality and disappear into a digital fantasyland, either because they are ill-equipped or unwilling to deal with tragedy and unhappiness, which are part of life.
Specifically, it shows the callous reactions to mass shootings in high schools. Learning to deal with loss and death is part of life; refusing to deal with the pain and grief will exact a grievous toll on you at some point or another. Simply put, if our society refuses to deal with the causes and our communal grief, the problem will only get worse. Thoughts and prayers won’t stop the next abbatoir. Do you know what will? Action.
It calls out our obsession with our cell phones and the digital world that keeps us from engaging with the world around us wholeheartedly. The desire for electronic stimulation that keeps the dopamine flowing isn’t a substitute for the joy of life. It’s not a substitute for human interaction and, yes, sometimes rejection. Put the phone down.
The film itself is a series of life lessons for The Man From the Future and his kidnapped cohorts. It is symbolic of life itself: none of us know what we are doing, and we will continually make mistakes until we learn, get lucky, or do something so stupid that we die.
It’s just that we don’t have a reset button.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is easily my favorite Gore Verbinski film. It has an inner anarchy and gonzo fire inside it so strong that I wish there were more films like it. It is insanely entertaining, it pokes a satirical stick in your eye and your heart, and it managed to wring tears from this reviewer because at its core is a bruised and worried soul. It’s bananapants in the best way. A satire about the end of the world? Maybe, but it conjures such a sense of unreality that it reaches out of the screen to grab you and fling you out into infinity.
In the end, you have to decide what’s real and what’s not.
That’s a skill we’re probably going to need going forward. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is very much a movie of the moment and comes with my highest recommendation. It sees the precipice we are heading towards, full speed, while we’re playing Candy Crush, instead of stomping on the brakes.
