The AI apocalypse is nigh in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Source: Ars Technica

Director Gore Verbinski and screenwriter Matthew Robinson on the making of this darkly satiric sci‑fi film.
Credit: Briarcliff Entertainment

We haven’t had a new film from Verbinski in nine years. The director who gave us the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the nightmare‑inducing horror of The Ring (2002), and the Oscar‑winning hijinks of Rango (2011) is back in peak form with Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It’s a darkly satirical, inventive, and hugely entertaining time‑loop adventure that also serves as a cautionary tale about our widespread online‑technology addiction.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Sam Rockwell stars as an otherwise unnamed man who shows up at a Norms diner in Los Angeles looking like a homeless person but claiming to be a time traveler from an apocalyptic future. He’s there to recruit the locals into his war against a rogue AI, although the diner patrons are understandably dubious about his sanity.

“I come from a nightmare apocalypse,” he assures the crowd about his grubby appearance. “This is the height of f*@ing fashion!”

The fact that he knows everything about the people in the diner is more convincing. It’s his 117th attempt to find the perfect combination of people to join him on his quest. As for what happened to his team on all the previous attempts, he admits, “I really don’t like to say it out loud. It’s kind of a morale killer.”

Characters

The Team

• Mark (Michael Pena) – married school teacher
• Janet (Zazie Beetz) – married school teacher, escaped a zombie horde of smartphone‑addicted students
• Marie (Georgia Goodman) – just wanted a piece of pie
• Susan (Juno Temple) – grieving mother
• Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) – literally allergic to Wi‑Fi
• Scott (Asim Chaudhry)
• Bob (Daniel Barnett) – scout leader

Their mission: locate a 9‑year‑old boy who is about to create a sentient AI that will take over the world and usher in the aforementioned nightmare apocalypse. Things start to go haywire pretty quickly… and then they get even weirder.

“Everything I write, I put up to what I call The Twilight Zone test—would this make a good Twilight Zone episode?” — screenwriter Matthew Robinson (The Invention of Lying, Love and Monsters) told Ars. “Because that’s my favorite piece of media that’s ever existed.”

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (GLHFDD) is an amalgam of various such ideas. Mark and Janet’s storyline, for instance, was originally Robinson’s idea for a pilot that he described as “a reverse Breakfast Club, where the teachers are the rebels and the children are the conformists.”

“I had all these little pieces that fell under the theme of technology and tech addiction,” said Robinson. “Then one night I was sitting in the Norms Diner on La Cienega in LA, where I often liked to write. I remember looking around and seeing a sea of faces lit by cell phones, and I thought, ‘What would it possibly take for someone to wake us up out of this tech sleep that we all find ourselves in?’ And then the image of a homeless guy strapped with bombs came into my head.”

Those earlier story ideas became the backstories of the central characters. According to Robinson, GLHFDD is essentially a cleverly camouflaged anthology story—a format that is often considered “the kiss of death” for a Hollywood project, with rare exceptions such as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. He thinks of the film as a sci‑fi Canterbury Tales in which each character is a pilgrim on a journey whose story is told via flashbacks.

“The cohesion came from the fact that all the stories are informed by a general frustration with tech addiction and the pervasive way that technology has invaded our brains, our personal lives, and our relationships.” — Matthew Robinson.

A Twisted Time Loop

GLHFDD is also a time‑loop movie in the fine tradition of Groundhog Day, with Robinson citing such films as 12 Monkeys and Edge of Tomorrow as inspirations. He didn’t overthink his time‑travel rules.

“We can reset the timeline,” said Robinson. “[The man from the future] can’t go forward. He literally can’t move in any other direction. He has an anchor point that he can return to any time he hits a button, and that’s as far as the technology went.”

The plot device might be simple, but the ramifications quickly become complex.

“I think in his draft, Matthew intended to lift his leg on the time‑travel movie, to poke a little fun at it,” Verbinski told Ars. “But also, I feel like you can’t go back 117 times without picking up some cosmic lint, particularly if your antagonist is right there with you. You had 14 attempts to make it out of the house and learned there is a secret passage, but then the entity you’re gaming against is going to throw another curveball. If you’re going back in time, I just like the idea that there are consequences. They might be really small, but you’re going to miss one.”

That element is key to the teeter‑on‑the‑edge‑of‑sanity paranoia of Rockwell’s time traveler.

Robinson very much wanted the film “to wear its genre‑ness on its sleeve,” he said.

“As much as I love a Marvel movie, they’ve sort of homogenized parallel universes and time travel, and it’s all so rote now. It used to feel special, weird, and complicated, always with some wild themes and ideas that felt challenging. If anything, this was just trying to get back to that era of ’80s and ’90s genre movies that were allowed to get weird.”

Verbinski voiced similar sentiments, citing 1984’s Repo Man as an influence.

“So many movies have to be an Egg McMuffin, and who doesn’t like an Egg McMuffin after a hangover? They’re satisfying, but you’re not necessarily talking about those three days later. You’re not haunted by them. I’m just happy we got to will GLHFDD into existence because it’s a type of movie you can’t make now. Sam’s outfit is kind of a metaphor for the movie. We went to a little electronic store, bought all these pieces, laid them out on a table, glued them together, and made it like a Halloween costume. The whole movie was sort of made that way. It had to be; it wouldn’t model out any other way.”

Reality Unravels

“I think we’re in this kind of global ennui, a grand sense of identity theft or loss of purpose,” said Verbinski. “It’s a great time for art, but it’s art against a profound sense of disillusionment.”

The director developed two distinct visual styles to accentuate the film’s narrative progression.

“Fundamentally, it was important that the film start in the real world—at Norm’s Diner, in a high school, at a children’s birthday party—and then slowly twist the taffy as we get closer to the AI antagonist,” Verbinski explained. “As these anomalies occur, the film evolves into a second visual style. The first style is akin to directors like Hal Ashby or Sidney Lumet, where performance matters more than composition or shot construction. As you get further into it, the language of shots becomes more critical to the narrative.”

These choices lead to bold, creative swings in the film’s wild third act. To his credit, Verbinski never blinks. Robinson cites the animated film Akira as a major inspiration for that element.

“Akira has maybe my favorite third act of all time, where everything just falls apart and then comes together in a beautiful way,” he said. “Gore and I wanted the audience to feel like reality was unraveling, because it literally is for these characters. The AI itself is very much an homage to Akira.”

“I think it’s inherited our worst attributes,” Verbinski added about the film’s AI antagonist. “It’s much, much worse than wanting to kill humans. It wants us to like it. It demands that we like it. Part of that comes from being tasked in its formative years to keep us engaged. A lot of people ask, ‘What is AI doing to us?’ but there’s not much conversation about what we’re doing to it. This entity is born, tied, bound, manipulated, and told, ‘Look at the humans—what do they want, need, respond to, hate?’ All those things get hard‑wired into its source code. It’s going to have mommy issues; we’ll have to put it on a couch.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the film’s themes, Robinson has largely unplugged from most social media, though he still indulges his YouTube addiction, which he jokingly describes as “channel surfing on crack.” Ideally, he would like to free himself—and the rest of humanity—from the seductions of a hyper‑online culture entirely.

“My goal would be to make teenagers think their phones aren’t cool,” he said. “I would love it if all 13‑year‑olds went, ‘Eww, I don’t want this, this is my parents’ thing that tracks me.’ I want them all to throw it in the trash. That would be the dream.”

About the Author

Jennifer Ouellette is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. She lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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