Come with me if you want to laugh

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is the AI dystopian romp we all need

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Long before our current collective freakout over artificial intelligence, Hollywood has been toying with anxieties over a near future in which the machines master humanity. The list is long and spans decades, but few have been as simultaneously playful, satirical and affecting as Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.

Premiered in 2025, Good Luck opens in a seemingly anonymous late-night diner somewhere in L.A. The patrons — some sitting in pairs, others in groups, others alone — are little islands of self-contained potential who are suddenly, shockingly brought together when a strange man bursts through the door. 

Played with irrepressible, irresistibly manic glee by Sam Rockwell, the unnamed man is covered in what look like plastic bags sprouting all kinds of arcane cables and wires. He’s dirty, bearded and crazed, so, of course, everyone assumes he’s a derelict off the street. However, he announces that he’s from the future and has come to this specific diner, at this specific time to find a specific group of people to join him on a one-night quest to save the world from an impending techno catastrophe.

That doesn’t do much to convince anyone, until he starts calling out individual patrons by name and referring to details about them that he shouldn’t know. That and he claims to be strapped with bombs.

You see, The Man From the Future has made this temporal journey 117 times, convinced that there is the perfect combination of people in that diner on that night to form a team that will defeat the AI that will one day soon destroy human civilization. He just hasn’t found the right group yet, and every previous attempt has resulted in everyone’s death but his own.

Rockwell’s opening rant is a thing to behold, as he badgers and berates, cajoles and threatens, and at one point cries in all-too-relatable exasperation, “Why is everyone from your timeline so fuckin’ dumb?”

Regardless, he rounds up enough people to join his “revolution” and they’re off on a galavanting, mind-bending crusade through the night — call it The Terminator if it was directed by Terry Gilliam (though it was actually directed by Gore Verbinski).

Despite Rockwell’s centrality, Good Luck is really an ensemble movie, with each core member of the group getting their own mini-biopic within the central narrative, which helps explain why they might be the perfect person for the job of saving the world.

There are Mark (Michael Peña) and Janey (Zazie Beetz), two disaffected teachers who have triggered a student revolt by pushing back against rampant classroom technology. There’s Susan (Juno Temple), whose son has recently died in a school shooting but brought back to “life” as a creepy AI golem. Finally, there’s Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who is physically allergic to digital technology and has a backstory that goes far deeper than it first appears.

Along with the frequently action-packed, deadly stages of the trek to reach a nondescript suburban home where the final battle for the future is supposed to take place, there are frequent moments of surreal absurdity, drama, tragedy and gallows humor. And while some critics argue that the plot gets increasingly scattershot as the crusaders engage with their objective, the deeper rumination of Good Luck is one that we all live with today: It’s hard to trust what you see and hear anymore, so what is reality anyway and how (or why) should we fight for it?

While that might seem vaguely philosophical, it’s a fact that Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is defiantly fun.

Rent it on Amazon Prime, AppleTV or other streamers.