This sci-fi comedy film is the sleeper hit of the year so far

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a new movie that features a couple of industry veterans performing at the top of their game, namely star Sam Rockwell and director Gore Verbinski. It has a message about the dangers of overreliance on technology that you’ve probably heard a thousand times before in other movies, books, and shows, but it delivers it in such a high-energy, mad-cap way that it breaks through your defenses. It’s weird, wild, and not performing especially well at the box office, but seems destined to become a sleeper hit that will still be talked about at the end of the year.

What is Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die about?

There’s a lot going on

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die starts with an unnamed man (Rockwell) entering a diner in Los Angeles and proclaiming that he’s come back in time to save the world from a horrible future; he just needs a few volunteers to help him. Obviously, that makes him sound like a crazy person. His outfit doesn’t help; he’s wrapped in a hooded plastic coat with piping and wires running up and down his body. It looks like an outfit made of garbage, which doesn’t help his case. But the man knows enough personal information about several of the patrons that they decide to join him.

The man comes from a future where people are so invested in virtual reality that they neglect the real world, which leads to resource scarcity and mass deaths. This resonates with some of the patrons, whose backstories we see in a series of vignettes that play out like some of the best Black Mirror episodes. High school teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz) are frustrated they can’t get their students to put down their phones long enough to pay attention in class, Ingrid’s (Haley Lu Richardson) boyfriend became obsessed with a virtual reality game, and Susan (Juno Temple) lost her son in a school shooting and had him returned to her in the form of a creepy clone who resembled her late son only in passing.

With this rag-tag army in tow, the man from the future leads them on a quest to augment the development of a powerful AI that has a large role in why the future is so terrible. It ends up that the man from the future has gone on this quest many times before, always without success. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a time loop movie, although one that doesn’t take itself quite as seriously as the best time loop movies out there.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is terrified of technology

But not in a preachy way

What’s interesting about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is that, on the surface, its observations about technology are pretty prosaic. Kids use their phones too much. Virtual reality games can be addicting. AI recreations of people are stiff and weird, and AI itself poses an existential threat to us all. It sounds like stuff someone afraid to operate their new smart TV would say.

And yet, the kernel of truth in the story helps the movie feel like more than just a weightless romp. There is a real fear that AI will replace tons of jobs in the near future, or at least that companies will use AI as an excuse to fire a lot of people they wanted to get rid of anyway. And while sci-fi authors have been predicting the rise of a tyrannical AI that oppresses humans for decades, it certainly feels more plausible today than ever before.

But the key to the success of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is that while it takes these concerns seriously, it is not a serious movie. Mark and Janet’s students follow them around like zombies when they think their phone privileges might be threatened, acting far more intense than even the most plugged-in tween you’ve ever met. The defenses that the AI uses to protect itself from these human interlopers are off-the-wall insane. The movie has so many ideas, courtesy of writer Matthew Robinson, that it almost can’t keep up with them. Any concern that it could get boring or predictable quickly hits a solid wall of thematic and visual invention.

Sam Rockwell and Gore Verbinski are perfectly matched

The dynamic duo we didn’t know we needed

Key to all this is Sam Rockwell’s performance as the man from the future, who has a serious mission but who looks and talks like an incurable crackpot. Rockwell has always had a taste for offbeat roles in movies like Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Gentlemen Broncos, which perhaps explains why he never became a hugely famous household name despite his obvious talent; he earned an Emmy nomination for basically one scene in the most recent season of The White Lotus, and it was fully deserved. In Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, his comic energy holds everything together, and we always feel like we’re in good hands.

Rockwell has a perfect match in director Gore Verbinski, who’s most famous for directing the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. Verbinki hasn’t made a movie since 2016’s underwhelming A Cure for Wellness. It’s not clear what made him want to come back for Good Luck, Have Fun Don’t Die, but clearly the extended break did him well. The movie crackles with an energy you’d expect from a much younger director who’s trying things as they go.

The forgotten sci-fi show that quietly predicted our world 14 years ago

A corporate-controlled surveillance state? Technology so useful it makes us complacent? Crazy talk, I tell you.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has definite sleeper potential

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die opened in theaters in mid-February, and has since made $7 million against a budget of $20 million. It’s not going to break any box office records, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it keeps doing really well on demand and on streaming for months to come. It’s hard to find good sci-fi comedies, and this one is fun enough that people are going to keep talking about it.