Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die: an AI comedy with just enough satirical bite

A recurring theme in the rhetoric around AI – or more specifically, generative AI – is the idea that widespread use of the technology is inevitable. Many of the companies behind it sell falsehoods about how generative AI represents the democratisation of various art-forms. Others claim that finding a manageable route to safeguard artists is the only way to combat it. Meanwhile entertainment companies that should be fighting against infringements on their property seem to be welcoming doom with open arms.  

With that in mind, it’s easy to empathise with the incredulous frustration of the AI satire Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. When Sam Rockwell’s shabby time traveller arrives in present-day Los Angeles to warn against artificial intelligence, his rantings about the tyranny of the smartphone ring true, even if the performance leans into a strange mix of kookiness and didacticism.  

In the opening scene at a diner, the camera follows a coffee pot to its various patrons. Every one of them is visibly scrolling through an assortment of social media junk – pacified by a drip feed of AI-generated content. It hints towards a direction which director Gore Verbinski and writer Matthew Robinson later make explicit reference: this is Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) for an insular generation raised on Instagram and TikTok; T2: Judgement Day (1991) for the doomscrollers.  

Rockwell’s unnamed time traveller picks up some reluctant partners in his revolution against AI. That includes the bumbling teacher couple Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), whose romantic spark has fizzled out along with their passion for their jobs. They are joined by the suspiciously knowledgable Susan (Juno Temple) and the suicidally depressed Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson). Flashbacks for each of these characters tell the audience why they would choose to join this raving time traveller on his mission. The others, like Scott (Asim Chaudhry) aren’t given the same courtesy and feel as though they are there to make up the numbers (and provide an occasional quip).  

Still, the flashbacks have satirical bite. In the most extreme of the characters’ backstories, we learn that Susan’s son died in a high school shooting, and that she paid for him to be cloned by an AI company who callously targeted bereaved parents.  

Verbinski and Robinson often veer into the same paranoid dark comedy tone which defined Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You (2018), though with less precision and fewer laughs. Many of the gags feel dated: jokes about ill-timed selfies have long since passed their expiration date as cutting observations of youthful vanity. Some moments feel of a piece with ‘random’ 2000s internet humour: think NyanCat (a name which should carbon-date any reader) and other feline-related memes. But this odd mix of shrewd contemporary observation and outmoded jokes sometimes has its own charm. Verbinski and co fall into clichés, but the film’s righteous fury just about keeps it afloat: fury at the industry around generative AI as well as our increasingly passive response to its existence. While the film takes some pessimistic twists and turns, it pushes the idea that generative AI dominance is far from a foregone conclusion.  

► Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is now streaming.