Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

That’s the idea behind Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a new sci-fi romp from Gore Verbinski that plays as a cross between The Terminator’s time-traveling apocalypse, a Black Mirror episode about AI brain rot, and the recursive humor of Groundhog Day. Rockwell stars as the frazzled Man From the Future, who shows up in an L.A. diner one fateful night with a bomb strapped to his chest and a simple request: a handful of volunteers to help him save the world.

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He claims it’s his 117th time attempting this and that, as there are 47 patrons at this particular eatery, so many possible combinations exist that it hardly matters who comes with him. He isn’t optimistic that they’ll succeed, but he’s equipped with a device that allows him to bail on this particular timeline and try again when they inevitably fail. Any volunteers who die along the way won’t be so lucky.

No one believes him, of course. Bearded and disheveled, he looks like a space-age madman whose call to action could just as easily be a street-corner rant. But then he starts referring to people by name and mentioning details that he could only know if he had indeed done this more than 100 times. And besides, the task at hand doesn’t sound that fraught: Rockwell and his cohort need only insert a flash drive into the supercomputer currently building a massively powerful artificial intelligence in order to curb some of its more destructive capabilities. “It's gonna be okay,” he assures them. “Or it's not. I don’t know.” Encouraging, right?

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The Man From the Future quickly finds his team in a mix of reluctant recruits and true volunteers. There’s married couple Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz, respectively), whose relationship would appear to be on the rocks; Susan (Juno Temple), a grieving mother who lost her son in a school shooting; reluctant Scott (Asim Chaudhry), who doesn’t believe a word of what the supposed time traveler has to say and would rather be anywhere else; and heartbroken Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), who’s dressed like a princess and volunteers out of a sheer hatred for technology. Interspersed with the main actions are flashbacks filling us in on their backstories, each of which is stranger than the last. Susan, for example, recently had her son’s consciousness uploaded into a lifelike robot by a soulless corporation that can’t be bothered with making their clones match the deceased’s personalities.

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Verbinski, a versatile genre director, saw his greatest success with The Ring and the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. His track record has been spotty and sporadic since the end of the aughts, with 2013’s The Lone Ranger and 2016’s A Cure for Wellness both failing to launch. This is his first movie in a decade, but it’s a welcome return to form: a gonzo warning about our overreliance on technology we neither understand nor control that doesn’t come across as a get-off-my-lawn lecture. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know about the ills of staring at your phone all day, but it might make you think twice before absentmindedly asking Siri the next random question that occurs to you.

This is his first movie in a decade, but it’s a welcome return to form.

A longtime character actor who finally got his due after winning an Oscar for his performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbings, Missouri, Rockwell has always brought a certain eccentricity to the rough-around-the-edges men he portrays. That was true of his scene-stealing turn in the most recent season of The White Lotus, and it’s just as true here. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else playing the unnamed Man From the Future with the same mix of believability and outlandishness, a balance that Rockwell has all but perfected.

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The title is taken from a greeting in the immersive virtual-reality world that some characters choose to reside in permanently rather than endure the drudgery of the real world, including Ingrid’s boyfriend — hence her tear-streaked makeup and antipathy toward technology. It could easily double as a semi-encouraging slogan for navigating the world on our side of the screen of late, which screenwriter Matthew Robinson knows isn’t that far removed from the dystopia he’s imagined into existence. The Man From the Future — who never sugarcoats anything but is just as rarely wrong in his assessments — puts it in terms simple enough to understand in any timeline: “Progress is only progress if it makes things better.”