If you’re feeling anxious about artificial intelligence steadily colonizing every aspect of modern life, Gore Verbinski’s maniacal new film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die — making its European premiere at the 76th annual Berlinale — will do absolutely nothing to ease your concerns. In fact, it might make things considerably worse, but the good news is you’ll be laughing your ass off while contemplating humanity’s impending obsolescence.
Nearly a decade has passed since Verbinski’s last theatrical outing, and he’s back in a major way here. Working from a wickedly sharp script by Matthew Robinson, the director who launched the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise unleashes a caustic, wildly inventive sci-fi satire with the same kind of frenetic “what the hell am I watching” energy that made me fall in love with Everything Everywhere All at Once, and it also boasts Sam Rockwell delivering one of the most gloriously unhinged performances of his career.
A disheveled man claiming to be a time traveler bursts into a Los Angeles diner at 10:10 p.m. wearing a transparent raincoat, a woolen hat, and what appears to be a suicide vest (there are certainly enough wires and gizmos attached to his abdomen to make this convincing). His mission: recruit a team from the 47 people inside to help prevent an AI-driven apocalypse that will kill half of humanity while the other half scrolls obliviously into digital servitude. The catch? This is his 118th attempt. He’s tried countless combinations of these same people, and every single time, something goes catastrophically wrong.
The film’s opening sequence is pitch-perfect, immediately establishing both the absurdity of its premise and the genuine stakes at play. Rockwell stomps across tables, snatches cell phones from patrons and flings them into the deep fryer, and delivers a fire-and-brimstone sermon about humanity’s tech addiction with the manic energy of a street-corner prophet — who just so happens to be completely, terrifyingly correct. Rockwell’s comedic timing has never been sharper, oscillating between sardonic delivery and genuine world-weariness, and there’s something unexpectedly endearing about watching a character who’s witnessed the end of the world over a hundred times struggle to maintain patience with the idiots he’s trying to save.
Eventually, a reluctant crew assembles: high school teachers Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple), and Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a young woman in a tattered princess dress who starts as a seemingly one-note depressive and gradually reveals herself as the film’s emotional anchor. Richardson is superb here, grounding the chaos with a performance that sneaks up on you; by the time her backstory clicks into place, she’s become as essential to the film’s success as Rockwell himself.
Verbinski structures the narrative around the present-tense mission while flashing back to reveal how each character ended up in that diner on that particular night. These vignettes function like standalone Black Mirror episodes, each one showcasing a different flavor of technological dystopia that doesn’t feel remotely far-fetched.
WARNING: MILD SPOILERS BELOW
The darkest and most effective of these involves Temple’s Susan, whose son was killed in a school shooting, an event treated with such casual matter-of-factness that when she arrives to identify the body, another mother glances over and asks, “First time?” Later, Susan is offered the opportunity to “resurrect” her child as a clone that spews advertisements between moments of artificial affection (it would’ve been more expensive to have a version without ads, of course). This is black humor at its finest, twisted and horrifying but also uncomfortably plausible given our current willingness to commodify literally everything, including grief.
The film takes similarly vicious swipes at phone-addicted students who’ve been groomed to behave like machines and VR escapism that offers refuge from an unbearable reality. Robinson’s screenplay is absolutely seething with rage at what we’ve allowed technology companies to do to us, and more importantly, what we’ve allowed ourselves to become.
At 134 minutes, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die does run a bit long; there’s probably a good 10-15 minutes that could’ve been trimmed, particularly in the final act where the apocalyptic showdown slows to a crawl. Some supporting players get saddled with thinly written parts that don’t give them much room to shine, and a subplot involving a character’s transition from analog living to VR addiction felt like it needed a bit more time in the oven.
But these are minor quibbles about a film that succeeds spectacularly at what it sets out to do. There’s a moment where Rockwell’s character explicitly rejects the Terminator solution of traveling back in time to murder a child in order to prevent some future calamity, dismissing it as both barbaric and stupid. It’s a sly joke that simultaneously honors and subverts one of cinema’s most iconic franchises, and it’s emblematic of the film’s smart-ass attitude toward its own genre conventions.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die will absolutely not be for everyone. A dozen people walked out of last night’s Berlinale screening within the first hour, and the film’s more provocative elements are almost guaranteed to alienate viewers who lack either the media literacy to understand its subtext, or the stomach for satire this vicious. Some may even feel insulted (and they probably should), but for audiences willing to embrace its chaotic ambition, this is essential viewing. It’s a defiant middle finger to our tech-addled present and the encroaching doom of an AI-driven future, a reminder that revolution doesn’t require an army — just a handful of people passionate (or desperate, or stupid) enough to make a difference.
Whether Verbinski himself views humanity’s fate as salvageable or already sealed remains deliberately ambiguous, but what’s clearly communicated is that he still has plenty to say as a filmmaker — some might even argue this film says a bit too much — and his willingness to swing for the fences with original, wildly ambitious material deserves celebration. We need more films like this, the kind of bonkers vision that can only exist when creators are given room to take genuine risks.
I texted a colleague immediately after the screening: “I fucking LOVED this movie,” and the next day, I stand by that assessment. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a banger, a film that feels genuinely alive and perhaps a little bit dangerous, and I can’t wait to see it again. For anyone pissed off or terrified about where things are heading, this film is for you, even if you just want to have a few laughs while acknowledging how fucked we all are.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is currently screening as part of the 76th annual Berlinale.