Gore Against the Machine: 'Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die'

Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski believes we may be At World's End, and he has AI in his sights.

The most confrontational sci-fi movie of the last decade isn’t about machines taking over the world, but about humans willfully giving themselves over to pure comfort at the cost of everything else. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it‘s been covered in plenty of sci-fi stories before, but Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die takes this theme and turns into one of the angriest, scariest, funniest diatribes against technology reliance ever put to film. When it ended, I, too, wanted to throw my phone on the ground and crush it.

Gore Verbinski, the crazed auteur famous for the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, has been out of Hollywood for several years after a string of expensive box-office flops. But by going independent with a smaller budget, he doesn’t lose any of his manic, looney-tunes energy and knack for Rube-Goldberg action set-pieces. If anything, the lack of big studio interference lets him go wild in ways no one could have anticipated. And let’s be honest; it’s unlikely any major studio would greenlight a movie with such aggressive anti-AI sentiments. The crowd that claims “AI is just a tool” is given no mercy here.

The plot begins one evening at Norm’s Diner in Los Angeles, when a “man from the future” bursts into the restaurant (a phenomenal Sam Rockwell doing an American Jack Sparrow strut) and claims the world is about to be taken over by a rogue AI - unless he recruits a specific group of diner patrons to help him save the future. The patrons think he’s crazy and continue to stare at their phones, but he becomes more convincing when he reveals he’s done this 117 times and knows personal information about each of them (yes, Groundhog Day gets referenced). After several patrons become convinced he may be telling the truth, the one-night quest to save the world begins.

Rockwell’s opening monologue sets the tone right away and promises the movie will be anything but subtle. He reminds people that “morning phone time” used to be a quick email check, but got longer and longer until people stopped getting out of bed. Record stores? Book stores? Phone numbers that you memorized? All gone. People stopped caring and got sucked into their black rectangles, which has let the rogue AI slowly take full control of everything. There is no room here for a nuanced approach to technology, like in Spielberg’s Ready Player One where they tried to take a moderate view of VR use (“it’s fun, but don’t forget to go outside!”). Here, technology only brings inevitable doom because people are fully reliant on it, especially as the plot shifts to the diner patrons’ backstories, revealing even more unnerving encounters with tech gone awry.

The satire in these flashbacks contains some of the darkest humor imaginable. But the jokes are rooted in something profoundly tragic: a dehumanized world that abandoned meaning, and seeks to fill that void with endless distractions and replacements for human connection. During one flashback, the subject of school shootings becomes a major plot point, and Gore doesn’t hold back his outrage at the frequency of school shootings in America, or the way social media influences more violence. At the same time, it makes for some of the funniest jokes of the year. It’s righteous anger channeled into righteous laughter, unveiling the deep psychosis of treating people as expendable. Imagine if video game logic happened in the real world, and you have a good idea of what the movie is exposing. Unapologetic satire is hard to come by these days, but this one pulls no punches, and becomes covertly pro-life in the process.

This is by no means a happy film despite its comedy aspirations. One could even say it’s the feel-bad comedy of the year. Similar to Verbinski’s horror remake The Ring, GLHFDD has little hope that the spread of technology can be stopped. It can only be slowed down and regulated. Fortunately, the film never ceases to entertain even when it goes to very dark places. Verbinski is still a capable craftsman and blesses this movie with unforgettable images; a horde of brain-dead teenagers hunting teachers, a birthday party ruined by a WiFi allergy, a Cheeto-dust-covered child on a throne of computer cables, and many more. All these images speak to the insanity technology has brought despite its many conveniences. There is one extremely gross image I could have done without, but to the movie’s credit, it will forever turn people away from normalizing AI slop.

While certainly not for everyone, GLHFDD’s urgent message is universal; put your phone down and embrace suffering. Before it’s too late.

Content Warning: course language throughout, bloody violence and some disturbing/gross-out imagery.